TEXTUAL ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL THEORY
Session Eight
Søren Hattesen BalleEnglish
Department of Culture and Identity
Agenda
Introduction: the summary assignment for today and next time
Introduction: today’s session Presentation:
fiction and non-fiction travel writing Romantic and Victorian travel
Class room discussion: Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the
Cevenne (1879) travel writing and the thematic function of comic
anomaly, displaced romance, and allegory
Fiction, non-fiction, and the literary mind
Fictional and non-fictional contracts: Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography and ”William J. Clinton”
The literary mind
Travel and Travel Writing
Why travel? Why write or make tv programmes about
travel? Why read about travel? Why watch travel programmes http://palinstravels.co.uk/index.php
Travel writing: the key aspects according to Fussel
Fiction Comic novel Romance
Quest Pastoral Picaresque
Allegory
Non-fiction: Essay Memoir Autobiography
Elements of non-fiction in travel writing
Essay: moral purpose Memoir: encounters with great men /
important events Autobiography
Elements of fiction in travel writing
Romance Pastoral:
Contrasts between an observer and the observed:
Rich – complex – sophisticated - city – morally inferior
Poor – simple - country – morally superior Pastoral elegy
Lament of loss, change, or death
Elements of fiction in travel writing
Romance Quest: tripartite structure (home-away-home) Pastoral (elegy):
Contrasts between an observer and the observed:
Rich – complex – sophisticated - city – morally inferior
Poor – simple - country – morally superior Picaresque: Real vs ideal. Deflation
Elements of fiction in travel writing
Allegory: primary and secondary orders of signification
Travelling = living and dying (life is a journey)
Travelling = reading and writing (what is suggested about the activities of reading and writing?)
Elements of fiction in travel writing
Allegory Travelling = reading and writing Traveller = reader or writer Unknown = the text
Travel writing as ”displaced” romance
”All this is to suggest that the modern travel book is what Northrop Frye would call a myth that has been ’displaced’ – that is, lowered brought down to earth, rendered credible ’scientifically’ […]” (Fussell 1980: 208)
Romantic and Victorian travel
Tourists, travellers, and art Ruins Landscapes
The beautiful: Culture, art: pleasure The picturesque: mediation between the
beautiful and the sublime The sublime: Nature: awe, horror, fear
Intertextuality
Stevenson’s dedication Intertextuality and allegory John Bunyan, The Pilgrims Progress
(1678)
R. L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne (1879)
Outline the uses of fictional elements: Comic novel (Does
Stevenson use comic anomalies? How and Why?)
Romance (how and why are the romance elements used?) Quest Pastoral Picaresque
Allegory (Of reading? Of writing? Of life?)
Outline the uses of non-fictional elements Essay (is Stevenson
making a moral point?)
Memoir: Do we learn something about famous people and places?
Autobiography: Do we learn something about Stevenson’s life
R. L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne (1879), p. 8 My Dear Sidney Colvin, The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and
fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to the end. But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world—all, too, travellers with a donkey: and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.
Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage. Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one. Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends? And so, my dear Sidney Colvin, it is with pride that I sign myself affectionately yours,
R. L. S.
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