Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600-1830

This work examines the forms of language that map out Italy and the warm south as an imaginative topography of pleasure within British and French travel writing, over the period 1600 to 1830. The book considers the Tour with reference not to the social history of travel but rather to strategies of description and commentary, narrative and thematic orderings and arguments and assumptions about how the encounter with the foreign should be managed. Traveller's descriptions of art and landscape are set within this wider context and the range of different concepts of gender are discussed - in particular of effeminacy and manliness - that are formed within commentaries on Italian landscape and culture.