From Europhile to Europhobe: Ann Radcliffe’s account of her 1794 European travels

Bradshaw, Penelope ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7240-9206 (2022) From Europhile to Europhobe: Ann Radcliffe’s account of her 1794 European travels. In: British Romanticism and Europe, 23-26 June 2022, Ascona, Switzerland. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

In the summer of 1794 the popular Gothic novelist, Ann Radcliffe, made a trip to continental Europe with her husband primarily to visit the landscapes which had featured so extensively in her fiction, but which she had not yet actually visited in person. Their immediate objective was the Swiss Alps but the couple found themselves turned back at the Swiss border. This frustration in achieving their main purpose, combined with increasing anxiety about social unrest encountered on their travels through Germany, resulted in the couple returning directly to England and setting out on an alternative tour of the English Lake District – a region described by Thomas West, author of the best known tour guide of the region, as offering a ‘miniature’ version of the Alps. Radcliffe subsequently published an account of this full twopart touring experience as A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794…To Which are Added Observations during a Tour to the Lakes. This text is important for many reasons, not least for what it tells us separately about Romantic constructions of both the Rhine and the English Lakes, but it is particularly so because of the way in which the reading of one location comes to inform the other. As Jeanne Moskal has argued, it is ‘rare, and perhaps unique, among Romantic-period travel books, in juxtaposing foreign with domestic travels. This paper will therefore explore the ways in which Radcliffe develops that juxtaposition during the course of the tour and will consider how, through this process, she enacts a linguistic and imaginative shift from committed Europhile to Europhobe.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Departments:	Institute of Arts > Humanities
Depositing User:	Anna Lupton
Date Deposited:	04 Oct 2022 11:25
Last Modified:	13 Jan 2024 13:32
URI:	https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/6630

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