Remediating Movement: Travel Writing in the French and British Periodical Press (1780-1820)

This project studies the role of the periodical press in the reception and development of travel writing in France in the period between 1780 and 1820. This was a period in which travel writing and the periodical press both underwent important changes, due to political, aesthetic, and technological developments. The project has explored how the experience of travel was transmitted via journals, magazines, and newspapers, and how the press thus conditioned the way in which travel writing was perceived by the public. When the travel text is moved from one medium to another, from the travel book to the periodical, the parameters for transmitting the experience change. The periodical press has been treated here in terms of remediation, in other words as something that stands between, as one of the layers separating the readers from the experience of travel. By combining a media perspective with literary and textual analyses, the project has examined the specificities of travel writing in the periodical press, and has asked the fundamental question: what happens to travel narratives when they are remediated by the press? The project has applied a large-scale corpus approach made possible by the on-going mass-digitization of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century periodicals. As such, it also needed to include an especially vigilant and critical interrogation of the tools and methods that were being applied. An important part of the project was therefore to analyse the methodological and theoretical implications of doing scholarship with the use of digital archives. A main result of the project has been to produce knowledge about the indepentant role that the periodical press played in transmitting experiences from travels and expedition outside of Europe and the cultural conceptions they entailed. It has become clear that the periodical press needs to be given a larger role in our understanding of the genre of travel writing in this period, and that the use of digital archives makes possible a broader exploration of the genre. The project has led to nine scholarly conference papers, and seven peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.

Prosjektet har gjort det mulig for prosjektleder å etablere seg på et nytt forskningsfelt utover doktorgradsarbeidet og dermed kvalifisere for førsteamanuensis-stilling ved NTNU. Prosjektet har også hatt positiv virkning på internasjonalt samarbeid, da både utenlandsopphold og konferansedeltagelse har bidratt til at prosjektleder og forskergruppen han har vært en del av har knyttet svært nyttige kontakter, primært, i Sveits, Frankrike, Storbritannia og USA.

This project studies the role of the periodical press in the reception and development of French and British travel writing in the period between 1780 and 1820. I aim to explore the ways in which the periodical press remediated travel writing, how encountering these works in periodicals conditioned the ways in which these texts were perceived and read by the public, and how the expectation of periodical publication influenced shifts in the rhetorical and narrative strategies of travel writers. The periodical press is to be treated here as something that stands between, as a layer that adds to the preceding layers which separate the readers from the experience of travel. By combining a media perspective with literary and textual analyses, the project will examine the specificities of travel writing in the periodical press, and ask the fundamental question: what happens to travel narratives when they are transmitted via newspapers and other periodical publications? The project applies a large-scale corpus approach made possible by the on-going mass-digitization of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century periodicals. As such, it needs to include an especially vigilant and critical interrogation of the tools applied; an important part of the project will therefore be to maintain a continuous scrutiny of the possibilities and limitations of doing literary scholarship with digital archives.