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Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing: New Directions
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Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing: New Directions

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2024) | Viewed by 4393

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Zoe Kinsley

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Humanities, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool L16 9JD, UK
Interests: literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; travel writing; poetic depictions of landscape and travel; manuscript culture; and literary representations of the British coast

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Humanities considers the ways in which our thinking about eighteenth-century travelling practices and the texts that narrate them is informed and advanced by engagement with recent developments in the field of travel writing studies, or in the study of humanities more widely. It looks to identify critical approaches which offer new ways of thinking about familiar works and traditions, and it also invites the discussion of texts that have, to date, been neglected or passed over.

This Special Issue invites new perspectives on the “dominant categories” of travel writing in the eighteenth century—the Grand Tour, home tour, and “exotic sea voyages and explorations” (Leask 94-95)—as well as encouraging submissions that blur the boundaries between those categories, or which look to texts that do not fit these designations. This volume invites fresh thinking about forms of movement and experience, forms of textual production, and bodies that move in the spaces of travel. We also welcome contributions that offer a long view on present-day concerns about nature and climate change, by engaging with work in Environmental or Blue Humanities to provide a historical perspective on the impact of travel, or the way that travellers understand their relationship to the world around them. The editor is looking for contributions on travel writing from across the period, in manuscript or print, by travellers who are well known or who might be new to readers. Articles from a range of different linguistic, cultural, or travelling traditions are welcome.

These may include, but are not limited to, consideration of the following:

  • Blue Humanities;
  • Travel and environmental change;
  • The “more-than-human”;
  • Vertical, slow, or micro-travel;
  • Travel and the senses;
  • Travel and disability;
  • Travel and the body;
  • Travel and conflict;
  • Travel and revolution;
  • Forced journeys;
  • Travel accounts in verse or image;
  • Travellee perspectives;
  • New perspectives on the relationship between the “rise of the novel” and the travel writing tradition.

Abstracts of 250 words should be sent to Dr. Zoë Kinsley or the editorial office by [14th June 2024]. Please also feel free to contact us for an informal discussion about the project.

Dr. Zoe Kinsley
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Authors of accepted abstracts will be asked to submit a full article for review by 31 October 2024. Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • blue humanities
  • travel and environmental change
  • the “more-than-human”
  • vertical, slow, or micro-travel
  • travel and the senses
  • travel and disability
  • travel and the body
  • travel and conflict
  • travel and revolution
  • forced journeys
  • travel accounts in verse or image
  • traveler perspectives

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Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.

Published Papers (6 papers)

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14 pages, 199 KiB  
Article
‘I Took Every Possible Care to Have Them Well Preserved’: Travelling Plants and Networks of Collection from India to England in the Letters of William Roxburgh to Sir James Edward Smith
by Kathryn Walchester
Humanities 2025, 14(2), 30; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020030 - 12 Feb 2025
Viewed by 519
Abstract
The final decades of the eighteenth century saw the significant expansion of botanical propagation and collections across the globe, both as an aesthetic corollary and to provide the underpinning resources for imperialism. The focus of this article is the development of the network [...] Read more.
The final decades of the eighteenth century saw the significant expansion of botanical propagation and collections across the globe, both as an aesthetic corollary and to provide the underpinning resources for imperialism. The focus of this article is the development of the network between botanists in India and England in the 1790s through the correspondence between William Roxburgh (1751–1815), superintendent of the Botanical Garden in Calcutta from 1793, and Sir James Edward Smith (1759–1820), who as Sarah Law notes, was ‘a focus of correspondence with every serious botanist in the world’ (Law, 2007, 184). Such networks were sustained by letters describing the plants and the treatment they needed, the habitat from which they had been taken, and details of how they had been collected and packed. Epistolary writing between plant hunters and British collectors can be understood, I suggest, as a form of travel writing. This is a form in which correspondence builds connections and relationships between fellow scientists and enthusiasts and the fragmentary focus on place, and the mobility of humans is replaced by close attention to the aesthetic and biological details of plants and the best ways of securing their successful transport across the globe. Using an ecocritical frame, this article explores the position of plants and biological specimens themselves as travellers and considers the ways in which their care and preservation have been articulated through sociable correspondence. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing: New Directions)
14 pages, 232 KiB  
Article
Eighteenth-Century Day Excursions: Finding Authority in the Narration of Brief Visits and “A Diversity of Objects”
by Zoë Kinsley
Humanities 2025, 14(2), 23; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020023 - 31 Jan 2025
Viewed by 628
Abstract
This article argues that a focus on the day excursion as a particular form of journey, with its inherent limits in relation to scale, distance, and duration, enables us to bring recent critical thinking on microtravel as a form with “foundations in the [...] Read more.
This article argues that a focus on the day excursion as a particular form of journey, with its inherent limits in relation to scale, distance, and duration, enables us to bring recent critical thinking on microtravel as a form with “foundations in the depth or intensity of description” into dialogue with scholarship that has given sustained attention to modes of descriptive practice that were specific to eighteenth-century British literature and the narrative representation of interior domestic space. The three English travellers under consideration are John Loveday (1711–1789), Dorothy Richardson (1748–1819), and Caroline Lybbe Powys (1738–1817). All made numerous home tour journeys of different kinds but never published their records of their travelling in their lifetimes. All displayed sustained interest in interior description, whether that was for the purpose of antiquarian research, as was the case with Loveday, and to some extent, Richardson, or as a means of collecting, arranging, and performing domestic aesthetic sensibility, as in the writing of both Richardson and Powys. The small local journeys analysed here speak of privileged leisure: the accounts offer experimentation in the narration of journeys made within limits, but those limits are rarely of opportunity. Yet these young travellers still negotiate authority: in the practice of day excursioning, and in writing up those experiences, we see each traveller utilising this compact form to find opportunities for self-assertion, employing the formulaic structures of antiquarian record and country house catalogue in order to articulate an independent curatorial voice. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing: New Directions)
15 pages, 253 KiB  
Article
A Zoocritical Reading of Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799)
by Neil Cliff
Humanities 2025, 14(2), 22; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020022 - 29 Jan 2025
Viewed by 705
Abstract
Thinking about how animals are categorised in Mungo Park’s journey into the interior of Africa provides a deeper understanding of their significance in the early exploration experiences of Africa by Europeans during this era. As it stands, there certainly exists a small but [...] Read more.
Thinking about how animals are categorised in Mungo Park’s journey into the interior of Africa provides a deeper understanding of their significance in the early exploration experiences of Africa by Europeans during this era. As it stands, there certainly exists a small but growing body of animal criticism in literary studies, and what can be suitably described as the animal turn is certainly gaining momentum more broadly within twenty-first century literary criticism and debate. However, there has been scant scholarly research on this theme of animals within eighteenth-century travelling practices. In recent times, the scholarship on Park’s journey has been highly particular; new understandings of Park’s trip are still being reached. Considering such specificity, an examination of Park’s narration of nonhuman animals during his trip will not only provide original insight into this aspect of his African experience but also interpret the ways that his narrative differentiates and categorises the various animal experiences he had whilst in Africa. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing: New Directions)
17 pages, 261 KiB  
Article
Echoes of Albany: The Transatlantic Reflections of Anne Grant in Memoirs of an American Lady
by Rob Sutton
Humanities 2025, 14(2), 20; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020020 - 29 Jan 2025
Viewed by 770
Abstract
This essay explores the mid-eighteenth-century travel experience of Scottish writer Anne Macvicar Grant [1775–1838]. Grant is perhaps best known for her late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travel writing and anthropological discourse focussed primarily upon the Scottish Highlands. Yet, the majority of Grant’s childhood [...] Read more.
This essay explores the mid-eighteenth-century travel experience of Scottish writer Anne Macvicar Grant [1775–1838]. Grant is perhaps best known for her late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travel writing and anthropological discourse focussed primarily upon the Scottish Highlands. Yet, the majority of Grant’s childhood was spent in Albany, New York. After she had established herself as a writer and published various texts dealing with her more recent experience in the Scottish Highlands, in 1808, Grant published Memoirs of an American Lady, a semi-biographical account of her childhood spent in the multicultural contact zone of a British military outpost. There are two key issues that this essay explores. First, I discuss the process of memory. Unlike intentional travelogues of the time, Grant’s text was not compiled with the aid of a diary or ledger. Grant’s entire account comprises memories of events that occurred over forty years in the past. Part of this essay then discusses the potential fallibilities of the fragility of human memory upon the traveller. While it may be anticipated that this first issue is detrimental to the account of the traveller, the second key issue that I explore is arguably advantageous to Grant’s account. The extent to which Grant, throughout her life, immersed herself within various marginalised communities undoubtedly allows for the production of a more nuanced and balanced account of external cultures than was the custom at the time. What complicates this account is the mixing of memory and cultural immersion. In her writing around the Scottish Highlands, Grant frequently relies upon her experience of certain cultures as a child to explain and convey her understanding of the different marginalised communities she encounters as an adult. Integral to this essay is the fact that this mixing of memory and cultural exposure also occurs the opposite way around. In the Memoirs, the writer’s recollections of the Mohawk or the Kanien’kehà:ka people and colonial Dutch communities as a child seem to be coloured and subjected by her more recent experience of the Highland people. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing: New Directions)
14 pages, 219 KiB  
Article
Recreating Place: Charles Fothergill and the Limits of Travel Writing
by Pam Perkins
Humanities 2025, 14(1), 10; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010010 - 14 Jan 2025
Viewed by 475
Abstract
In 1806, Charles Fothergill, a young man with a strong interest in natural history, set out on a seven-month tour of Orkney and Shetland. His goal was to write a book about the islands that would emulate the work produced by the earlier [...] Read more.
In 1806, Charles Fothergill, a young man with a strong interest in natural history, set out on a seven-month tour of Orkney and Shetland. His goal was to write a book about the islands that would emulate the work produced by the earlier traveller Thomas Pennant on Wales and mainland Scotland. Despite his ambition, Fothergill never succeeded in completing his book. His surviving manuscripts, which range from a rough working journal covering one part of his journey to some comments on botany that seem ready to go to press, suggest some of the difficulties that he might have found both in constructing a coherent narrative of his travels and in recreating a version of Pennant’s antiquarian and scientific travels at a time when tastes in travel writing were shifting to focus more on the pleasures of landscape and aesthetics. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing: New Directions)

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9 pages, 177 KiB  
Essay
Curious Travellers: New Journeys for the Home Tour
by Mary-Ann Constantine
Humanities 2025, 14(2), 34; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020034 - 17 Feb 2025
Viewed by 308
Abstract
This short concluding chapter reflects on the work of an ongoing collaborative academic project focused on the C18th home tour. Curious Travellers could be described as a ‘crucible’ project—a space in which different media, different perspectives, and different research skills combine and collide. [...] Read more.
This short concluding chapter reflects on the work of an ongoing collaborative academic project focused on the C18th home tour. Curious Travellers could be described as a ‘crucible’ project—a space in which different media, different perspectives, and different research skills combine and collide. Currently funded by the AHRC, it is a digital humanities project involving TEI tagging and crowd-sourcing, but its foundation is archival research into manuscripts. It is focused through the influential Tours of Wales and Scotland published by the naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant, yet it seeks to unpick the multiple voices and collaborations behind his texts and to explore their legacy in the journeys and texts of others. The creation of new editions continues to generate new topics and research questions, including Anglophone/Celtic-language interactions; the writings of women tourists; the role of material objects (specimens and souvenirs) and of visual culture in knowledge exchange and production. Increasingly, project researchers are relating their work to broader global contexts of colonialism and environmental history. The diversity of the genre has proved hugely stimulating for a range of audiences beyond academia: community engagement and creative practices have been a key feature from the start. There are, of course, challenges—practical, methodological, financial. This reflective piece will acknowledge the constraints, as well as the possibilities, of being multi-stranded, cross-disciplinary—and intermittently funded. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing: New Directions)
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