British Travel Writing
- Course Code
- ENAM 0430
- Course Type
- Tutorials
- Subject Credit
This tutorial explores the rich seam of British travel writing from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. This was a period when changes in transport technology, political circumstances, and cultural attitudes, allowed people from the British Isles to travel as never before: within Britain, across Europe, and the wider world. The genre of travel writing flourished in these circumstances. Notable examples include Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Turkish Embassy Letters (1716-1718), Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839). Travel also became a major preoccupation in fiction, for instance with Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), or Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899).