Module Information

The experience of travel, the myriad delights and occasional pains of the Grand Tour, underwrote the discussion of aesthetics for much of the eighteenth century and into the Romantic period. For many eighteenth-century commentators, travel on the continent allowed them to experiment with ideas and sensations thought impossible within Britain's more confined culture and less dramatic landscape. Several of the most important writers and theorists of the British Enlightenment were to find inspiration for their theories of art, culture and society while travelling on the continent.

This module explores this important point of cultural debate in eighteenth-century and Romantic culture, but also seeks to criticise it as a partial and prejudicial view of the world. To further this debate texts describing other parts of Europe and the near East are included on the module. Important writing by women is also featured. So too is material which satirises the experience of tourism as tedious and unpleasant. Attention will also be paid to the experience of travel in the period and its relationship to the vicissitudes of bodily experience

_Seminar Programme
Building on an initial discussion of the nature of terms such as 'Sublime', 'Beautiful' and 'Sensibility' the module will examine the deployment of this vocabulary in a variety of cultural and geographical settings. What will be important in class discussion is the question of how far these critical judgements located in discourses were dependent on either class aspirations or gendered relations of power. Also at issue will be the sexual insecurity (or excitement) offered by a tour on the Continent.