Geographies of Travel : Impressions of America in the Long Nineteenth Century.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Roberson, Susan L.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

United States--Description and travel.

United States.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (374 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

College Station : Texas A&M University Press, 2024.

Summary:

Travel writing was the most popular genre of writing in the nineteenth century. Initially published in newspapers and journals as dispatches from the road, these works allowed readers to join in on fabulous adventures by becoming armchair tourists--second-hand voyeurs of the peoples and places the writer visited. In order to take readers along on their journeys, travel writers typically recorded miles covered and dates of travel in a log or diary. They also documented key details of the experience itself, describing the conditions of the road, the people they met, and their accommodations, food, and clothing. The nineteenth century, specifically, offered a form of travel writing that commented on the ruined environment that ran afoul of the century's ethos of progress, with voices such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John James Audubon exploring a newfound environmental consciousness. Geographies of Travel is organized geographically by region, with essays examining local journeys in the Northeast, Midwest, Far West, and the South. This regional arrangement allows readers to consider the geographic imagination of each region and the kinds of travel it invited, as well as providing valuable insight on the ways in which Americans reacted to both natural and social regional landscapes. Each region is treated chronologically so as to interrogate not only individual narratives but also the ways that travel, tourism, and modes of transportation evolved over time. The work concludes with an examination of Henry James's The American Scene in a coda that brings together his astute observations of the Northeast and the South at the turn of the century. Occasional interludes point to the ways that travel reverberates in the artistic work of some of the authors, making connections between travel and the imagination.

Contents:

Home travels in Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours

Metaphoric traveling with Henry David Thoreau

William Cullen Bryant's summers on the lakes

Margaret Fuller's "Wests"

Catharine Maria Sedgwick's great excursion

Constance Fenimore Woolson: nostalgia on the lakes

Emily Posts's transcontinental motor tour, New York

Francis Parkman: traveler, tourist, cultural voyeur

Mark Twain and the dialogics of Roughing It

Helen Hunt Jackson: Bits of Travel at Home and what the West sounds like

John Muir and the nature of travel writing

Charles Fletcher Lummis: mapping A Tramp across the Continent

Emily Post in the West

John James Audubon: migrating with the birds

William Cullen Bryant and a tour of the South

Frederick Law Olsted in the cotton South

John Muir's botanizing tramp through the South

Constance Fenimore Woolson: tourism and "the ancient city"

Mark Twain's South in Life on the Mississippi: geographies of travel

Mobility and immobility in The Souls of Black Folk

Henry James: The American Scene and the geographic imagination.

Notes:

Electronic book.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

1-64843-259-X

OCLC:

1518755387