Session Eight Søren Hattesen Balle English Department of Culture and Identity

 Introduction: the summary assignment for today and next time  Introduction: today’s session  Presentation:  fiction and non-fiction  travel writing  Romantic and Victorian travel  Class room discussion:  Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne (1879)  travel writing and the thematic function of comic anomaly, displaced romance, and allegory

 Fictional and non-fictional contracts: Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography and ”William J. Clinton”  The literary mind

 Why travel?  Why write or make tv programmes about travel?  Why read about travel?  Why watch travel programmes 

 Fiction  Comic novel  Romance  Quest  Pastoral  Picaresque  Allegory  Non-fiction:  Essay  Memoir  Autobiography

 Essay: moral purpose  Memoir: encounters with great men / important events  Autobiography

 Comic novel  Comic anomalies: normal vs weird

 Romance  Quest: tripartite structure (home-away-home)

 Romance  Pastoral:  Contrasts between an observer and the observed: Rich – complex – sophisticated - city – morally inferior Poor – simple - country – morally superior  Pastoral elegy  Lament of loss, change, or death

 Romance  Quest: tripartite structure (home-away-home)  Pastoral (elegy):  Contrasts between an observer and the observed: Rich – complex – sophisticated - city – morally inferior Poor – simple - country – morally superior  Picaresque: Real vs ideal. Deflation

 Allegory: primary and secondary orders of signification  Travelling = living and dying (life is a journey)  Travelling = reading and writing (what is suggested about the activities of reading and writing?)

 Allegory  Travelling = reading and writing  Traveller = reader or writer  Unknown = the text

 ”All this is to suggest that the modern travel book is what Northrop Frye would call a myth that has been ’displaced’ – that is, lowered brought down to earth, rendered credible ’scientifically’ […]” (Fussell 1980: 208)

 Tourists, travellers, and art  Ruins  Landscapes  The beautiful: Culture, art: pleasure  The picturesque: mediation between the beautiful and the sublime  The sublime: Nature: awe, horror, fear

 Stevenson’s dedication  Intertextuality and allegory  John Bunyan, The Pilgrims Progress (1678)

 Outline the uses of fictional elements:  Comic novel (Does Stevenson use comic anomalies? How and Why?)  Romance (how and why are the romance elements used?)  Quest  Pastoral  Picaresque  Allegory (Of reading? Of writing? Of life?)  Outline the uses of non- fictional elements  Essay (is Stevenson making a moral point?)  Memoir: Do we learn something about famous people and places?  Autobiography: Do we learn something about Stevenson’s life

 My Dear Sidney Colvin,  The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to the end. But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world—all, too, travellers with a donkey: and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.  Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage. Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one. Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends? And so, my dear Sidney Colvin, it is with pride that I sign myself affectionately yours,  R. L. S.