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Watson, Nicola
(2013).
Abstract
This paper enquires into the experiences of American literary tourists to nineteenth-century Britain, as evidenced in early to mid-century published travel memoirs by authors such as Washington Irving, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Grace Greenwood and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and in a later fictive account supplied by Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did Next (1886). It describes and explains the emergence of a conventional itinerary of literary places and details a set of possible American stances ranging from the sentimental to the ironic to the elaborately indifferent. I argue that American travel-writers were centrally influential in the construction of British literary geography, and that this construction was central to the making of American cultural identity. Their writings seek to condense a usable literary version of Britain as a repository of, and pre-history to, American literature.
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- Item ORO ID
- 46514
- Item Type
- Book Section
- Project Funding Details
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Funded Project Name Project ID Funding Body Not Set Not Set The Open University (OU) - Keywords
- Travel-writing; Washington Irving; Harriet Beecher Stowe; Nathaniel Hawthorne; literary geography
- Academic Unit or School
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Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) > Arts and Humanities > English & Creative Writing
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) > Arts and Humanities
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) - Depositing User
- Nicola Watson