American Travel Literature, Gendered Aesthetics and the Italian Tour, 1824-62

Examines tourists’ aesthetic responses in the context of US nation formation'American Travel Literature’ analyses US tourist writings about Italy from 1824 to 1862 to explain what roles transatlantic travel, aesthetic response, and the genre of tourist writing played in the formation of the United States. Its interdisciplinary methodology draws on antebellum visual culture, tourist practices, and shifting class and gender identities to describe tourism and tourist writing as shapers of an elite (and then normative) national subjectivity.Bringing perspectives from art history and aesthetics, the book historicises aesthetic practices by tracing nineteenth-century US representations of Italy. It draws connections between tourist writing and visual culture as means of understanding the depth of Americans’ turn towards visual iconography in articulating social and national identities.Key FeaturesThe interdisciplinary approach pushes analysis of growing area of travel writing furtherThe trope of Italy as a woman reveals how gendered patterns of thought and response processed concepts of national identity thus recognising gender as a crucial mode of perceptionHistoricizes aesthetic practices by looking closely at a particular genre (tourist writing) and its social functions in the antebellum period