IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/eurrev/v15y2007i01p115-124_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Eighteenth Century Travelogues as Models for ‘Rethinking Europe’

Author

Listed:
  • ANDERSEN, FRITS

Abstract

Travelogues on expeditions in the 1760s to Tahiti and Yemen among other places are part of the early reshaping of Europe. They display the features of a historical threshold or ‘Sattelzeit’ between the classical and the modern world. But these travelogues also demonstrate another paradigmatic shift with important impact on the conditions for thinking of Europe in present day literary history. Some travelogues inaugurate in their rhetorical practice and anthropological content a problematic cultural relativism and aestheticism in relation to the world outside Europe. Other texts express doubts and contradictions, hesitating without being relativistic, focusing on cultural processes and concrete specifics rather than on essences, and adopting a pluridimensional perspective on the customs the traveller is confronted with. While the former track leads to the dead-end of reductive schematism of 19th century Orientalism, the latter may serve as a relevant model for rethinking Europe as part of a globalised world today. In what follows, the travel writing on Tahiti by James Cook, Bougainville and Diderot, Carsten Niebuhr's travelogue from his expedition to Yemen, Flaubert's Voyage en É:gypte, and Gauguin's NoaNoa, are analysed.

Suggested Citation

  • Andersen, Frits, 2007. "Eighteenth Century Travelogues as Models for ‘Rethinking Europe’," European Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 15(1), pages 115-124, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:eurrev:v:15:y:2007:i:01:p:115-124_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1062798707000117/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:eurrev:v:15:y:2007:i:01:p:115-124_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/erw .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.