Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840: `From an Antique Land' [Paperback]

Nigel Leask (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 8, 2004 | ISBN-10: 0199269300 | ISBN-13: 978-0199269303

The first book of its kind to study the Romantic obsession with the "antique lands" of Ethiopia, Egypt, India, and Mexico, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing is an important contribution to the recent wave of interest in exotic travel writing. Drawing generously on both original texts and modern scholarship in literature, history, geography, and anthropology, it focuses on the unstable discourse of "curiosity" to offer an important reformulation of the relations between literature, aesthetics, and colonialism in the period.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is a timely, engrossing, and important revisionary account of Romantic period travel writing.... Leask's approach is characterized by scrupulous attention to detail, ingenuity, and subtlety."--Byron Journal

"Wide-ranging and discriminating.... Leask's book is refreshingly comparative, and boldly breaks new ground.... He unsettles a number of orthodoxies which have cramped our understanding of what happened when Western Europeans travelled outside the boundaries of their own civilization."--Times Literary Supplement

"Addresses the intersections between space and time more fully than any other recent book on Romantic travel.... Leask's detailed study contributes valuably to the body of criticism on Romantic travel literature and, more broadly, to criticism on Romantic conceptions of place and space."--European Romantic Review

"Wide-ranging and discriminating.... Leask's book is refreshingly comparative, and boldly breaks new ground.... He unsettles a number of orthodoxies which have cramped our understanding of what happened when Western Europeans travelled outside the boundaries of their own civilization."--Times Literary Supplement

"This is a timely, engrossing, and important revisionary account of Romantic period travel writing.... Leask's approach is characterized by scrupulous attention to detail, ingenuity, and subtlety."--Byron Journal

"Addresses the intersections between space and time more fully than any other recent book on Romantic travel.... Leask's detailed study contributes valuably to the body of criticism on Romantic travel literature and, more broadly, to criticism on Romantic conceptions of place and space."--European Romantic Review

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "Review from hardback edition... addresses the intersections between space and time more fully than any other recent book on Romantic travel ... Leask's detailed study contributes valuably to the body of criticism on Romantic travel literature and, more broadly, to criticism on Romantic conceptions of place and space."--European Romantic Review

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "Review from previous edition Wide-ranging and discriminating . . . Leask's book is refreshingly comparative, and boldly breaks new ground . . . He unsettles a number of orthodoxies which have cramped our understanding of what happened when Western Europeans travelled outside the boundaries of their own civilization."--David Womersley, Times Literary Supplement

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "Leask ranges more widely than any of his predecessors . . . Leask admirably rises to the challenge by widening his scrutiny beyond works composed in English . . . an admirable and original synthesis of much rarely explored travel material."--Studies in Travel Writing

"The analysis Leask gives of the problems at the heart of travel writing should prove of interest to students of the early novel and of nascent ethnography and anthropology. Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing is scholarship of high caliber." --Eighteenth-Century Life

About the Author

Nigel Leask is at Lecturer in the English Faculty, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge.

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (April 8, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199269300
• ISBN-13: 978-0199269303
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,408,244 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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