Overview

The topos of the journey is one of the oldest in literature, and even in this age of packaged tours and mediated experience, it still remains one of the most compelling. This volume examines the ways in which the legacy of the Grand Tour is still evident in works of travel and literature. From its aristocratic origins and the permutations of sentimental and romantic travel to the age of tourism and globalization, the Grand Tour still influences the destinations tourists choose and shapes the ideas of culture and sophistication that surround the act of travel. The essays in this collection examine a wide variety of literature—travel, memoir, and fiction—and explore the ways travel and ideas of “culture” have evolved since the heyday of the Grand Tour in the 18th century. The sites of the Grand Tour remain a powerful cultural draw, and they continue to define ideas of taste and learning for those who visit them.

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9781611477993

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Reviews

Enhanced with the inclusion of a ten page Bibliography and an eight page Index, The Legacy of the Grand Tour: New Essays on Travel, Literature, and Culture is an impressively informed and informative work of originality and scholarship that would augment any academic library Literary Studies and Travel Literature reference collection and supplemental studies reading list. Exceptional and instructive, it should be noted for personal reading lists that The Legacy of the Grand Tour is also available in a Kindle edition. * Midwest Book Review * Colletta contends that the [a]nxiety about authenticity that runs through so many travel narratives can be explained if we see the traveler as a would-be anti-tourist (xv). The essays that form the collection persuasively support this claim, making The Legacy of the Grand Tour a valuable source for scholars not only of that eighteenth-century phenomenon, but of travel writing, cross-cultural encounters, and the nature of cultural memory. It will prove essential reading for scholars of the canonical writers to whom individual essays are devoted, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, George Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Laurence Durrell, and Patricia Highsmith. . . . All in all, Colletta and the other contributors to The Legacy of the Grand Tour have created a fascinating tour of narratives that should lead the reader not only to discover neglected authors and re-evaluate canonical ones, but to question our own modes of travel-writing, tourist activity, and self-representation as travelers and consumers of places, spaces, and experiences. * Papers on Language and Literature *

Author Information

Lisa Colletta is professor of English and director of the Communication and English Program at the American University of Rome.

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