Chloe Chard assembles fascinating passages from late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century accounts of travel in Italy, by Northern Europeans, writing in English (or, in some cases, translated into English at the time); 'Tristes Plaisirs' includes writings by Charles Dupaty, Maria Graham, Anna Jameson, Sydney Morgan, Henry Matthews and Hester Lynch Piozzi. The extracts often focus on the labile moods that contribute to the 'triste plaisir' of travelling (as Madame de Stael termed it): moods such as restlessness, anxiety, exhaustion, animal exuberance, sexual excitement and piqued curiosity. The introduction considers some of these responses in relation to the preoccupations and rhetorical strategies of travel writing during the Romantic period and introductory commentaries examine the ways in which the passages take up a series of themes, around which the five chapters are ordered: 'Pleasure', 'Rising and sinking in sublime places', 'Danger and destabilization', 'Art, unease and life', and 'Gastronomy, Gusto and the Geography of the Haunted'. -- .

The Romance of the Forest (1791) heralded an enormous surge in the popularity of Gothic novels, in a decade that included Ann Radcliffe's later works, The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian. Set in Roman Catholic Europe of violent passions and extreme oppression, the novel follows the fate of its heroine Adeline, who is mysteriously placed under the protection of a family fleeing Paris for debt. They take refuge in a ruined abbey in south-eastern France, where sinister relics of the past - a skeleton, a manuscript, and a rusty dagger - are discovered in concealed rooms. Adeline finds herself at the mercy of the abbey's proprietor, a libidinous Marquis whose attentions finally force her to contemplate escape to distant regions. Rich in allusions to aesthetic theory and to travel literature, The Romance of the Forest is also concerned with current philosophical debate and examines systems of thought central to the intellectual life of late eighteenth-century Europe. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

In this rich exploration of the era of the Grand Tour, contributors from the fields of history, art history, literary history and theory, science history, and anthropology investigate the experiences of travelers and their ways of understanding and representing their encounters with the foreign. From the beginning of the seventeenth century through the early decades of the nineteenth century, the practice of the Grand Tour supplied a crucial point of reference for travel and imaginative geography in general. At the same time, concepts of pleasure and enjoyment became entangled with visual and verbal representations of that which was foreign. With chapters by Ken Arnold, Rosemary Bechler, Richard Hamblyn, Roy Porter, E. S. Shaffer, Nicholas Thomas, Tzvetan Todorov, Richard Wrigley, and the editors, Transports discusses a range of original topics. These include narrative orderings of travel; the classification of exotic objects; pastoral and paradisal topography in the paintings of Claude Lorrain; Beckford's invocations of China as he travels through Italy; volcanoes in the discourses of travel and geology; the experience of Rome; crossing boundaries and exceeding limits in travel and in the sublime; liberty and license in New Zealand; foreigners' responses to the high-velocity culture of London; and Byron's sublime impulse beyond the established bounds of the Grand Tour. Published for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art

The topos of the journey is one of the oldest in literature, and even in this age of packaged tours and mediated experience, it still remains one of the most compelling. This volume examines the ways in which the legacy of the Grand Tour is still evident in works of travel and literature. From its aristocratic origins and the permutations of sentimental and romantic travel to the age of tourism and globalization, the Grand Tour still influences the destinations tourists choose and shapes the ideas of culture and sophistication that surround the act of travel. The essays in this collection examine a wide variety of literature-travel, memoir, and fiction-and explore the ways travel and ideas of "culture" have evolved since the heyday of the Grand Tour in the 18th century. The sites of the Grand Tour remain a powerful cultural draw, and they continue to define ideas of taste and learning for those who visit them.