Premium
The Uses of Travel: Science, Empire and Change in 18th‐Century Travel Writing
Author(s) -
Vanek Morgan
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/lic3.12280
Subject(s) - argument (complex analysis) , empire , contradiction , travel writing , reading (process) , history , vulnerability (computing) , aesthetics , function (biology) , psychology , sociology , epistemology , literature , law , political science , art , philosophy , computer science , medicine , computer security , evolutionary biology , biology
This essay surveys recent critical approaches to 18th‐century travel writing, with an emphasis on a seeming contradiction in the way the field treats the possibility that the traveller might be changed by the experience of travel. On the one hand, the traveller's vulnerability to external influence seems to represent a threat to British imperial authority, particularly in studies of scientific travel in the service of empire – but on the other hand, recent studies on the novel's debts to travel writing insist that the traveller's capacity to change is fundamental to any argument for travel's edifying potential or contribution to civic improvement. To resolve this divide, this article will argue that reading 18th‐century travel writing for the moments in which the ‘changeable’ traveller appears in a positive light might help to open new avenues of research on the form and function of change in 18th‐century records of scientific observation. Looking ahead, this essay proposes that future studies in scientific travel might draw inspiration from recent research on sympathetic travellers as agents of empire, and continue to investigate how the traveller's capacity for change could add nuance to our history of the scientific observer as – in Captain Cook's terms – a ‘disinterested’ “eyewitness to a fact.”