The Beaten Track
European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to `Culture', 1800-1918
Published on 4. March 1993
Book
Paperback/Softback
370 pages
978-0-19-812276-0 (ISBN)
Description
The Beaten Track is a major study of European tourism during the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century.
James Buzard demonstrates the ways in which the distinction between tourist and traveller has developed and how the circulation of the two terms influenced how nineteenth and twentieth-century writers on Europe viewed themselves and presented themselves in writing. Drawing upon a wide range of texts from literature, travel writing, guidebooks, periodicals, and business histories, the book shows how a democratizing and institutionalizing tourism gave rise to new formulations about what constitutes `authentic' cultural experience. Authentic culture was represented as being in the secret precincts of the `beaten track' where it could be discovered only by the sensitive true traveller and not the vulgar tourist.
Major writers such as Byron, Wordsworth, Frances Trollope, Dickens, Henry James, and Forster are examined in the light of the influential Murray and Baedeker guide books.
This elegantly written book draws links with debates in cultural studies concerning the ideology of leisure and concludes that in this period tourism became an exemplary cultural practice appearing to be both popularly accessible and exclusive.
James Buzard demonstrates the ways in which the distinction between tourist and traveller has developed and how the circulation of the two terms influenced how nineteenth and twentieth-century writers on Europe viewed themselves and presented themselves in writing. Drawing upon a wide range of texts from literature, travel writing, guidebooks, periodicals, and business histories, the book shows how a democratizing and institutionalizing tourism gave rise to new formulations about what constitutes `authentic' cultural experience. Authentic culture was represented as being in the secret precincts of the `beaten track' where it could be discovered only by the sensitive true traveller and not the vulgar tourist.
Major writers such as Byron, Wordsworth, Frances Trollope, Dickens, Henry James, and Forster are examined in the light of the influential Murray and Baedeker guide books.
This elegantly written book draws links with debates in cultural studies concerning the ideology of leisure and concludes that in this period tourism became an exemplary cultural practice appearing to be both popularly accessible and exclusive.
Reviews / Votes
`The Beaten Track' is the best book I know that deals with the phenomenon in nineteenth-century Britain and America. ... This is a book that everyone interested in ninetheenth-century and modern British and American culture should read. * Patrick Brantlinger, Professor of English, Indiana University * `The Beaten Track is rich in historical detail and literary quotation, with provoking speculations on "gendered geography", capitalism and leisure, and political anxieties about crowds. * Times Higher Education Supplement * As literary and cultural history the book is a rich offering ... this is a scholarly and creative book which has something to say to social historians. * Anthony Sutcliffe, University of Leicester, Social History Society Bulletin, Autumn 1993 * His book amply illustrates the important role of literature in structuring and interpreting - in an endless circle of influence - the world of the nineteenth-century tourist. * Patricia Jasen, Lakehead University, Victorian Review, Winter 1993, Vol. 19, No. 2 * James Buzard provides a thorough and searching analysis of the cultural implications of the expansion of European travel during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Buzard is concerned not just to record the huge growth in nineteenth-century tourism, but to examine how this important development in the experience of more and more people carried after it sociocultural consequences. * Byron Journal '94 * `Elegant' is the epithet that recurs in tributes to this fascinating book. It seems both apposite and misleading. Exact, in the scientist's sense of powerful economy: a thesis which accounts satisfactorily for its data. Inadequate, however, to James Buzard's impressive range. His title barely indicates the scope of this work. * RES New Series XLVI 184 *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Oxford University Press
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
8 pp plates
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
616 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-812276-0 (9780198122760)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Buzard is the coeditor of Critical Texts
(journal of literary/cultural criticism and theory)
(journal of literary/cultural criticism and theory)
Content
Tourist and traveller in the network of 19th-century travel; tourism and anti-tourism - conventions and strategies; a scripted continent - British and American travel-writers in Europe, c. 1825-1875; ambivalent appropriations - culture and the tourist in James; Forster's trespasses - tourism and cultural politics; epilogue.