The Legacy of the Grand Tour

Reviews / Votes

Enhanced with the inclusion of a ten page Bibliography and an eight page Index, "The Legacy of the Grand Tour: New Essays on Travel, Literature, and Culture" is an impressively informed and informative work of originality and scholarship that would augment any academic library Literary Studies and Travel Literature reference collection and supplemental studies reading list. Exceptional and instructive, it should be noted for personal reading lists that The Legacy of the Grand Tour is also available in a Kindle edition. * Midwest Book Review * Colletta contends that the "[a]nxiety about authenticity that runs through so many travel narratives" can be explained if we see the traveler as a would-be anti-tourist (xv). The essays that form the collection persuasively support this claim, making The Legacy of the Grand Tour a valuable source for scholars not only of that eighteenth-century phenomenon, but of travel writing, cross-cultural encounters, and the nature of cultural memory. It will prove essential reading for scholars of the canonical writers to whom individual essays are devoted, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, George Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Laurence Durrell, and Patricia Highsmith. . . . All in all, Colletta and the other contributors to The Legacy of the Grand Tour have created a fascinating tour of narratives that should lead the reader not only to discover neglected authors and re-evaluate canonical ones, but to question our own modes of travel-writing, tourist activity, and self-representation as travelers and consumers of places, spaces, and experiences. * Papers on Language and Literature *