The Legacy of the Grand Tour

New Essays on Travel, Literature, and Culture

Contributions by James Buzard, Chloe Chard, Clare Elizabeth Hornsby, Laura Olcelli, Shannon Russell, Nicholas Stanley-Price, Judy Suh, Andrew R. H. Thompson Edited by Lisa Colletta

Publication date:

09 December 2015

Length of book:

226 pages

Publisher

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

ISBN-13: 9781611477979

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.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Grand Tour and its Legacy, Lisa Colletta
Chapter 1: ‘Fog in the Channel’: Joking, Laughing, and Traveling
Chloe Chard
Chapter 2: Ellis Cornelia Knight as Artist, Writer, and Traveler in Late Eighteenth-Century Italy
Clare Hornsby
Chapter 3: Violet Ida Chomley: “not the ‘Grand Tour’ but the ‘Downward Path’”
Laura Olcelli
Chapter 4: Three British Travelers in Egypt: Sophia Lane Poole, Lucie Duff Gordon, and Emmeline Lott
Elisabetta Marino
Chapter 5: George Eliot On and Off the Beaten Track: “Recollections” of Germany and Italy
Andrew Thompson
Chapter 6: D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Tour of Fascist Italy: Sea and Sardinia and Etruscan Places
Judy Suh
Chapter 7: Postcolonial Valediction: Bitter Lemons of Cyprus and the Legacies of the Grand Tour
James Buzard
Chapter 8: Consuming Italy: From Goethe’s Italian Journey to Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love
Shannon Russell
Chapter 9: Ripley’s Tour: The Grand Tour as Confidence Trick in The Talented Mr. Ripley
Lisa Colletta
Chapter 10: See Rome—and Die: Legacies of the Grand Tour in a Roman Cemetery
Nicholas Stanley-Price
About the Contributors

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.