Travel and maps of identity in English narratives, 1719-1850.

In the eighteenth century, improvements in roads and the increasing availability of maps fostered significant growth in British travel. This dissertation explores how representations of travel developed and complicated ideas of national and individual identity. The idea of the map becomes a crucial index for the formation of both national and social identity. Literal maps define possession of space by imposing border lines upon a landscape; a similar figurative process occurs through narrative accounts of travel. The works I explore reveal the extent to which mental maps define both space and relationships in civil society. In a discussion framed by Spinoza's metaphysics, we see how liberty of travel also incorporated forms of mental and literal imprisonment, mapping an idea of Britain that excluded much of the nation. Tourist accounts of Derbyshire's Peak District describe a landscape rendered sublime for its natural and economic wonders; simultaneously, they incorporate miserable, often impoverished laborers as part of that scenery. Aesthetic discourses of the sublime and picturesque provided codes by which tourists rationalized their own taste as superior to that of others, even as they conformed to unoriginal generalizations. Similarly, in his early poetry, Wordsworth trumpets the dispossessed figures of the Lake District: their strength, in his eyes, stems from a unique relationship with landscape. In The Brothers, for example, Wordsworth displaces the importance of human relationships in lieu of a pastoral sense of place. Yet in his later writings, he resists opening his sublime landscape to the lower classes, placing his landscape aesthetic beyond the reach of the laborer. Finally, I discuss how the Gothic novel juxtaposes the freedom of travel with the sublime threat of imprisonment. Rather than a paranoid craze for fantasy, the Gothic reacts to the politics of the Pitt administration in the 179Os, which used the constant threats of surveillance and suspicion to limit political radicalism. Although these representations of travel appear in diverse literary forms, they aestheticized Britain as an aesthetic unity in spite of often sublime threats to social harmony.Ph.D.English literatureEuropean historyLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsPhilosophyPhilosophy, Religion and TheologySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130105/2/9712071.pd