Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Through diaries, newspaper articles, guidebooks, and magazine essays, Stowe examines the personal and social reasons that well-known travelers such as Emerson, Twain, and Henry Adams, as well as African Americans like David F. Dorr and women like Margaret Fuller, sailed east... These writers used their traveling experience to hone writing skills and create a literary style, much the same as travel writers do today."--Library Journal "... an almost sociological reading of some American travel literature... Works by writers like Mark Twain, Henry James, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving and others (including the African-American writers William Wells Brown and David F. Dorr) are reviewed to show how travel literature helped forge not only the identity of the nascent American nation but also the travelers' own identity."--New York Times Book Review "The ways in which the Old World was used and represented by American writers in the development of their nation's own cultural identity is a large, important and fascinating theme which Professor Stowe comprehends and examines in great deal."--Times Literary Supplement "Beginning with the work of Washington Irving, travel literature was a popular art form in 19th-century America... This volume effectively shows the evolution of the genre's conventions, the socioeconomic roots of its popularity, and the multiplicity of its social, cultural, and aesthetic functions."--Choice
Table of ContentsPrefaceAcknowledgmentsCh. 1Americans Abroad3Ch. 2Travel as Ritual16Ch. 3Guidebooks: The Liturgy of Travel29Ch. 4Travel Chronicles: Testimony and Empowerment55Ch. 5Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Reluctant Traveler74Ch. 6Margaret Fuller and the Discourses of Travel102Ch. 7The Innocents in Europe: Twain, Travel Humor, and Masculinity125Ch. 8Henry James, or The Merchant of Europe161Ch. 9Henry Adams, Traveler195Afterword221Notes223Works Cited241Index253
