Łucja Rautenstrauchowa – a Tourist or a Traveller in Italy?
Łucja Rautenstrauchowa – a Tourist or a Traveller in Italy?

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines an Italian tour: Łucja Rautenstrauchowa’s W Alpach i za Alpami (In and Beyond the Alps) (Warsaw 1847). Rautenstrauchowa was a published writer: she authored sentimental romances, a pamphlet on female education as well as several travelogues. She also co-translated Madame de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy (1808) into Polish (1857), the only Polish rendition until today. To determine whether the travel writer figures herself as a tourist or a traveller, I start from Chloe Chard’s discussion of the Grand Tour as a social practice. I then present close readings of selected passages from Rautenstrauchowa’s Italian tour (using my own translation of the Polish text) to see whether the approach to travel was that of a proper traveller (i.e. Romantic) or – rather – that of a tourist (i.e. anti-Romantic) (Chard 1999). This shall involve an investigation into how much boundary crossing, sustained foreign encounter and evidence of exploratory spirit are to be found in the text at issue. Finally, I touch upon John Urry’s theory of tourist gazes to see how, if at all, they apply to Rautenstrauchowa’s text.

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