Travels in Andalusia in the Nineteenth Century: The Making of Romantic Modernity

Travel to Andalusia in the nineteenth century appears as a response to the dual mimetic and media revolution confronting literature at the time. The travel writers whose works are examined here : Laborde, Chateaubriand, Taylor, Irving, Gautier, Alexandre Dumas père, Botkin, Andersen, De Amicis, and others—engage in dialogue with the very instruments of modernity: lithography, photography, and journalistic literature.

For this reason, these literary works, which vary widely in genre and publication format (picturesque travel accounts, tales, serialized stories, letters, etc.), must be situated within the broader cultural environment linked to Andalusia during the period. This includes Richard Ford’s Spanish Handbook, the photographs of Charles Clifford and Jean Laurent, Owen Jones’s studies of the Alhambra, the Great Exhibition of London in 1851, and Gustave Doré’s illustrations for Davillier’s Spain.

At the end of this journey, one gains an understanding of how the encounter between a problematic genre, the travel narrative, and a space upon which multiple, sometimes contradictory, loci are projected : Andalusia gave rise to practices that reveal the impact of Romantic modernity on literature.