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ABSTRACT
Scholarship on travel writing tends to focus on accounts by writers who spent time in the places they depict. But neither Romantic-era nor twenty-first-century cognitive theory gives such a limited notion of travel. Lalla Rookh (1817), a hybrid poetic text by Irish writer Thomas Moore, presents the idea that reading is a form of travel that provides access to distant places. Moore had never been to the lands – India, Egypt, Persia – about which he wrote, but rather constructed his text through meticulous research. In both Lalla Rookh’s text and paratext Moore makes the Orientalist argument that his research gave him the same experience of the East as one who had seen it first-hand. Through readings of Lalla Rookh and Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy, this essay argues that “travel” studies might benefit from the more capacious notion of “transport” as a disciplinary and conceptual category.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 For more on the various connotations of “transport” for Romantic experience, see Dekker (Citation2005, 8).
2 For more on the mind’s creation of perception, particularly in literature, see Haekel (Citation2017).
3 See Murray (Citation2018), Nolan (Citation2008), Rangarajan (Citation2016), Sharafuddin (Citation1994), and Vail (Citation2005).
4 Considering that the frame story of Lalla Rookh is set in 1669, and most of the nested tales much earlier than that, these reports betray a Romantic Orientalist belief that time in the East stands still; despite the fact that his stories are set in the past and based on centuries of retelling, Moore’s depiction of the East is taken to be so “authentic” that readers believe he has been there in the present.
5 “[Ilderim?]” is presumably Marchand’s best guess at an illegible portion of the letter. Ilderim is an 1816 Orientalist poem by Henry Gally Knight.
6 Note the way that science and literature are casually linked together, reflecting their significant overlap in Romantic thought.
7 According to Sharafuddin, Fadladeen is a representation of a particular critic, Francis Jeffrey, who ended up praising the poem (Citation1994, 211). So it would seem Moore’s foreclosure was a success.
8 It is the same word in the novel’s original French, transport.
9 Moreover, in the age of the museum, statues themselves may no longer inhabit their original spaces.
10 Barbara Witucki’s essay (Citation2011) drew my attention to this important passage.
11 It would be interesting to explore the afterlives of each textual argument: Moore’s Oriental citations were adopted by Poe, who also did not visit the East; Staël’s novel was used as a guide by travellers visiting the sights of Rome in person.