A Solitary Wanderer: Tourism and Romantic Subjectivity in William Beckford’s Travel Writing
A Solitary Wanderer: Tourism and Romantic Subjectivity in William Beckford’s Travel Writing

Author(s): Przemysław Uściński
Subject(s): Cultural history, 18th Century, 19th Century
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: William Beckford; Romanticism; Grand Tour; travel writing; aesthetics; landscape; tourism
Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on William Beckford’s 1780–1781 letters from his Grand Tour in Europe, collected in 'Dreams, Walking Thoughts and Incidents', referring also to the journal documenting his 1787–1788 travels in Portugal and Spain, to explore Beckford’s writing in terms of the aesthetic, affective and ideological transitions in the cultural conventions of travel writing that signalled the onset of Romanticism. Art collector, bibliophile, writer, and an heir to the enormous fortune, Beckford is chiefly remembered for his outlandish tale, 'A History of the Caliph Vathek' (1786), though his voluminous travel writing has recently received more extensive scholarly examination. The rise of sentimentalism and the early-romantic tendencies in literature had an impact on Beckford’s approach to the presentation of travel experience, visible in the focus on emotionally charged impressions as well as the aesthetic appeal of the described scenes and objects. These features, however, are often intriguingly balanced with the authorial commentary highlighting the ironic distance towards the dominant conventions of travel writing. Consequently,Beckford’s writing often combines sublimity with bathos and learned commentary with highly emotive and eccentric passages that subvert contemporary literary conventions.

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