American Travel Literature, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Italian Tour, 1824–62 / / Brigitte Bailey.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Complete eBook-Package 2018
• VerfasserIn: Bailey, Brigitte,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2018
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures : ECSALC
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (336 p.)

Examines tourists’ aesthetic responses in the context of US nation formationAmerican Travel Literature analyses tourist writings about Italy from 1824 to 1862 to explain what roles transatlantic travel, aesthetic response and the genre of tourist writing played in the formation of the United States. The Italian tour and its textual and visual expressions were forms through which predominantly white, northeastern elites dreamed their way into national identity and cultural authority. Its interdisciplinary methodology draws on antebellum visual culture, tourist practices and shifting class and gender identities to describe tourism and tourist writing as shapers of an elite (and then normative) national subjectivity. Bringing perspectives from art history and aesthetics, it historicises aesthetic practices, illuminating the depth of Americans’ turn towards visual iconography in articulating social and national identities.The book investigates tourists’ triangulations of the categories of ‘England’, ‘Italy’ and ‘America’, discusses authors understood as national representatives − Irving, Cooper, Sedgwick, Kirkland, Fuller, Hawthorne and Stowe − in the context of other US and European writers and artists and looks at transatlantic tourist writing as a significant genre of the period that shaped the nation. Key FeaturesThe interdisciplinary approach pushes analysis of growing area of travel writing furtherThe trope of Italy as a woman reveals how gendered patterns of thought and response processed concepts of national identity thus recognising gender as a crucial mode of perceptionHistoricizes aesthetic practices by looking closely at a particular genre (tourist writing) and its social functions in the antebellum period

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter 1 Irving’s Landscapes: Aesthetics, Visual Work, and the Tourist’s Estate -- Chapter 2 The Protected Witness: Cooper, Cole, and the Male Tourist’s Gaze -- Chapter 3 Gazing Women, Unstable Prospects: Sedgwick and Kirkland in the 1840s -- Chapter 4 Fuller and Revolutionary Rome: Republican and Urban Imaginaries -- Chapter 5 National Spaces, Catholic Icons, and Protestant Bodies: Instructing the Republican Subject in Hawthorne and Stow -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index