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Looking for the Picturesque: Tourism, Visual Culture, and the Literature of Travel in the Long Nineteenth Century by Lori N

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Looking for the Picturesque: Tourism, Visual Culture, and the Literature of Travel in the Long Nineteenth Century by Lori N Looking for the Picturesque: Tourism, Visual Culture, and the Literature of Travel in the Long Nineteenth Century by Lori N. Brister B.A. in English, May 2004, The University of Southern Mississippi M.A. in English, November 2006, University of Exeter A dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 17, 2015 Dissertation directed by Jennifer Green-Lewis Associate Professor of English The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Lori N. Brister has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of March 27, 2015. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation. Looking for the Picturesque: Tourism, Visual Culture, and the Literature of Travel in the Long Nineteenth Century Lori N. Brister Dissertation Research Committee: Jennifer Green-Lewis, Associate Professor of English, Dissertation Director Maria Frawley, Professor of English, Committee Member Judith Plotz, Professor Emerita of English, Committee Member ii © Copyright 2015 by Lori N. Brister All Rights Reserved iii Dedication To my mother, Bonnie Brister, whose love of reading first inspired me to write, and to my fiancée, Julie Seigel, who writes every story with me. iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank my Dissertation Director, Jennifer Green-Lewis, whose many years of mentorship has touched every word I have written and every class I have taught. I would also like to thank my committee members, Maria Frawley and Judith Plotz, for their invaluable guidance and encouragement throughout my doctoral studies. Many thanks to Daniel DeWispelare and Nathan Hensley for graciously giving your time to read my work. I am very grateful to Ana Parejo-Vadillo, who shaped this project in its infancy as my Master’s dissertation director at Exeter University, and for the constant support and wisdom of Kavita Daiya, who has taught me to take up more space in the room. I could not have made it this far without the love and unconditional support of my friends and family. I want to thank Amber Cobb Vazquez, who has come through this entire process with me and has been, both professionally and personally, a calm voice in every storm. My parents and family have been my cheering section for as long as I can remember. I am incredibly lucky, and not just a little spoiled, to be surrounded by such strong, smart, funny women as my mother and sisters, who have shared every tear and every triumph. Everything I have ever achieved, or ever will, is because of the love, strength, and friendship of my mother, Bonnie Brister. You have brought me through this. And, finally, I would like to thank Julie Seigel, who saw the long nights of writing until the early morning hours and the mountains of paper that filled our home, and still said yes one snowy night in February. The rest of my life is yours. v Abstract of Dissertation Looking for the Picturesque: Tourism, Visual Culture, and the Literature of Travel in the Long Nineteenth Century This dissertation examines the interstices of tourism, visual culture, and the literature of travel, including guidebooks, travel narratives, novels, and ephemera. Situating the origins of sight-seeing in the picturesque aesthetics of the late eighteenth century, I argue that the literature of travel acts as a textual lens through which tourists and travel writers look for signs of picturesque aesthetics and stereotypes of local culture, particularly when travelling in Italy. Ultimately, my dissertation takes two divergent strands of scholarship, aesthetics and semiotics, and examines how they are inherently and inextricably linked via touristic reading practices. My first chapter examines the guidebooks of John Murray, Karl Baedeker, and John Ruskin. Murray and Baedeker’s guidebooks include itineraries and star-systems that taught tourists to look for picturesque and/ or stereotypical signs of a given culture. Ruskin critiques Murray’s methodologies, but, because his text is also a guidebook, he cannot avoid contributing to the textual mediation of tourism. Chapter 2 is a study of intertextuality and aesthetic subjectivity in the travelogues of Charles Dickens, Amelia Edwards, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Vernon Lee, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Lilian Bell. In my third chapter, I trace the development of the picturesque gaze in the novels of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, and E.M. Forster. In Chapter 4, I read tourist ephemera and iconography as the material artifacts of visual culture. My coda presents a case study of the travel scrapbooks of Isabel Stewart Gardner to show how a single tourist experienced the intersections of tourism, text, visual culture, and ephemera. For the Digital Dissertation Companion visit loribrister.com/dissertation.html. vi Table of Contents Dedication ......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ v Abstract ............................................................................................................................. vi Table of Contents ............................................................................................................. vii List of Figures ................................................................................................................. viii Frontispiece ........................................................................................................................ x Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1. “Glad to learn so much without looking”: Aesthetics and Semiotics of Guidebooks ..................................................................................... 18 Chapter 2. “Everyone has wept and gurgled”: Originality, Subjectivity, and the Intertextuality of Travel Writing .......................................................................... 54 Chapter 3. “Somebody else’s sieve”: Tourism, Textual Mediation, and the Picturesque Gaze ................................................................................... 109 Chapter 4. Tourism in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: The Ephemera of Travel …………………………............................................ 164 Coda. Post-Tourism: What Comes After? ..................................................................... 217 Works Cited ................................................................................................................... 232 vii List of Figures Frontispiece. Doctor Syntax Sketches the Lake by Thomas Rowlandson ......................... x Figure 1. La trahison des images by René Magritte ...................................................... 167 Figure 2. La reproduction interdite by René Magritte ................................................... 168 Figure 3. Loch Katrine by William Henry Fox Talbot .................................................. 175 Figure 4. At Lake Cuomo by Alfred Stieglitz ................................................................ 177 Figure 5. Great Pyramid and Sphinx by Francis Frith ................................................... 178 Figure 6. Forum Trajanum, Rome by Edmond Behles .................................................. 182 Figure 7. Venezia by Carlo Naya ………………………………………………...…… 184 Figure 8. Interior of the Secundra Bagh by Felice Beato …………………………….. 190 Figure 9. Thomas Cook Advertisement for Transportation to the Great Exhibition ..... 198 Figure 10. Cover of Guide to Cook’s Tours in France, Switzerland, and Italy ............. 198 Figure 11. Brochure art for ‘Cook’s Tours Round the Globe,’ ..................................... 200 Figure 12. A Cook’s Ticket, South Eastern & Chatham Railway .................................. 201 Figure 13. Luggage label for Grand Hôtel d’Angleterre, Chamonix ............................ 203 Figure 14. Hotel & Kurhaus, St. Blasien ....................................................................... 204 Figure 15. Bertolini’s Palace, Naples, Italy .................................................................. 204 Figure 16. Bertolini’s Hôtel Europe, Milan, Italy ......................................................... 204 Figure 17. Grand Hôtel Naples ...................................................................................... 205 Figure 18. Gd. Hotel “Royal” ........................................................................................ 205 Figure 19. National Hotel, Cairo ................................................................................... 207 Figure 20. Bristol Hotel, Cairo ...................................................................................... 207 viii Figure 21. Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo, Egypt .................................................................. 207 Figure 22. Péra Palace, Constantinople ........................................................................ 208 Figure 23. Péra Palace, Constantinople (with Arabic script) ....................................... 208 Figure 24. Péra Palace, Istanbul ................................................................................... 208 Figure 25. Google Ngram of picturesque :: photographic ...........................................
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