Tag: Europe

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Esterhammer — Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland (2015)

Estherhammer, Angela, Dianne Piccitto, and Patrick Vincent, eds. Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Prospects. (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print.) Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

“Among the authors discussed are Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Byron, Mary Shelley, James Boswell, Frances Brooke, Walter Scott, Felicia Hemans, and the Swiss cartoonist Rodolphe Töpffer.” See Chap. 8, “Prints, Panoramas, and Picturesque Travel in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal of a Tour on the Continent” by Pamela Buck.

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Fennimore — Viewed in Prospect or Retrospect (2024)

Fennimore, Eve Dixon. “‘Viewed in Prospect or Retrospect’: Dorothy Wordsworth’s ‘Revisiting’ on the 1820 Continental Tour.” Criterion 17.1 (Winter, 2024): 89–103.

Abstract: “This paper argues that Dorothy Wordsworth, in her often overlooked Journal of a Tour on the Continent, was essentially ‘revisiting’ places that she was viewing for the first time, as she had visited them secondhand through William’s stories and writings about them. In 1820, Dorothy, William, and Mary Wordsworth embarked on a tour of the continent in the inverse direction of William’s youthful 1790 trip. For thirty years, Dorothy had heard stories and read about his experiences, building up an image in her mind of what the Continent would be like which changed her own exploration of the sights. By exploring Dorothy’s tour as a form of revisiting, we see how imagining a place before physically seeing it shapes the viewing experience, blurring the line between reality and imagination. Further, a close study of Dorothy’s journal illustrates the impermanence of sites and travelers as they inevitably change over time.”

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Hammack — Imperfect Notices (May 2018)

Hammack, E. R. “‘Imperfect Notices’: The 1820 Continental Journal of Mary Wordsworth.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 37.1 (May 2028): 91–110.

Abstract: “Through a close reading of Mary Wordsworth’s 1820 Continental travel journal, this essay challenges her peripheral status in studies of the Wordsworth writing circle. It offers a formalist analysis of the text, demonstrating the qualities and aspects of Mary’s writing that contribute to the importance of her journal in relation to the other literary endeavors of the tour. Mary’s writing, with its elliptical style and panoramic descriptions, reveals a sophisticated and imaginatively creative mind, one that was an equal participant in the coterie of the tour’s writers, including Henry Crabb Robinson and Dorothy Wordsworth. This essay seeks to free the journal from its critical relegation to a mere resource for William Wordsworth’s Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, instead approaching the journal on its own terms. The analysis calls for further consideration of Mary’s journals in relation to contexts of travel writing, romantic narrative, and women’s writing.”