Textuality and Travel from Gray to Byron.

Bolton, Zoe Ann (2009) Textuality and Travel from Gray to Byron. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis explores the relationship between textuality and travel in the writings of a key selection of eighteenth-century and Romantic authors. While existing critical work on the travel literature of this period tends to concentrate only on published versions of texts and does not fully address issues of form and textual status (Korte. 2000; Blanton, 2002; Thompson, 2007); this study focuses on composition, editing and publication, and considers important questions about the relationship between the experience of travel and its expression in certain textual forms - journals, letters and poetry. How is a writer's relationship with travel articulated at the compositional stage through the use of particular forms and generic spaces? To what extent does the private or public status of a text determine a writer's engagement with travel? How does the physical act of travelling impact on the creative process? What effect does editing and publication - authorial and non-authorial - have on the experience of travel represented in a text? What are the implications for modem editors and critics? This study aims to answer these questions through a series of writer-specific case studies, informed by the work ot Donald Reiman (1983; 1997), Jack Stillinger (1991; 1994; 1999) and Jerome McGann (1983, 1991). The first of two chapters on Thomas Gray examines the relationship between letter writing, poetry and place in his Grand Tour correspondence with Richard West (1739-1741); while the second explores the evolution of his Lake District Journal (1769) from private document to public Picturesque work. The third chapter considers travel as a context for textual self- translation in Mary Wollstonecraft's letters to Gilbert Imlay and Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796). The penultimate case study concentrates on exile and poetic composition in Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage I-III(1816); while the final chapter examines shared writing and travel in Percy and Mary Shelley's History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817). These particular case studies have been selected because they reveal how the dynamic between textuality and travel operates: an understanding that can fundamentally alter critical perceptions of these writers and their texts.