Reiseberichte und mythische Struktur. Romanistische Aufsätze 1983–2003 (review)

Travel, as movement from A to B, in search of food, survival of the species (tribe or nation), territorial or financial gain, education (as in the Grand Tour), development, enlightenment, geographical or sociological exploration or pleasure is, arguably, one of the most common human activities. Unsurprisingly, some of the most widely interpreted written texts contain accounts of travel, departures and arrivals, flights, conquests and other assertions of identity, ranging between history, religion, myth and literature; from the travels of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Odysseus's return to Ithaka, Noah's voyage to safety, Moses' circuitous route towards Canaan in pursuit of the Promised Land, the progress of Bunyan's pilgrim ('from this world to that which is to come'), the adventures of Don Quixote, and Henri Heine's Tableaux de Voyages (Reisebilder), to W.G. Sebald's palimpsest of deceptively accidental European literary perambulations in Schwindel. Gefühle. In this remarkable offering Friedrich Wolfzettel presents the fruit of twenty years of his philological labours in articles on accounts of travel in the Romance languages, richly referencing also much of his prolific output beyond the collection under discussion. The twenty-seven articles contained in this volume are written in German, French, Spanish and Italian and explore the travel literature in these languages, as well as in English and German. Although not dealing with the earliest travelogues in his field, say the Wandering Scholars from the ninth century under Charlemagne, they cover an unusually wide literary range from the chanson de geste of the thirteenth century to the nouveau roman. With three exceptions, all essays have been in print before in other collections between 1983 and 2003. They are reprographically reproduced, hence their original pagination is retained, with consecutive page numbers of the present collection added. Bibliographical information is not assembled in a general bibliography at the end, but is contained in footnotes. The articles are organized into four sections: medieval period; Humanism and Enlightenment; Romanticism and the nineteenth century (with eleven articles the largest section); and the modern era. The sequence of items is not governed by geography or chronology, but by the date of first publication of Wolfzettel's articles. Perhaps understandably, in attempting to map out the long-awaited theoretical foundations of the critique of travel writing, Wolfzet-tel's introductory section is more likely to document a stage of the journey than its destination. The articles also represent a piece of individual research history, in conjunction with Wolfzettel's other publications, including Ce deésir de vagabondage cosmopolite (Tübingen, 1986) on French literature of travel of the nineteenth century, and Le discours du voyageur. Pour une histoire littéraire du récit de voyage en France, du Moyen Age au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1996), as well as his critical anthology of accounts of travels in Spain, Spanische Wanderungen 1830-1930 (Hamburg, 1991). This collection is not intended to complete a methodological legacy, but to serve as reflections complementing these books, as well as to provide a wider context within Romance studies and comparative criticism. In the endeavour to gloss his choice of title for this collection 'Travel Accounts and Mythical Structure' (reminiscent also of the title of the first article in his introductory section, 'On the problem of mythical structures in accounts of travel'), the author places cheek by jowl a number of, in part, contradictory statements: in his preface the author states as his selection criterion for this volume those of his articles which refer exclusively to accounts of 'real' journeys but specifies to the point of retraction by also including travels 'presented' as real ('reale (oder als solche ausgegebene) Reisen'). As further exclusions Wolfzettel mentions here fictional journeys and travel novels, although he also concedes that strategies of fictionalization and aetheticization are common even in the apparently most pragmatic accounts of travel, making the distinction between the factual and the fictional ultimately uncertain. The attribute 'mythical' is, therefore, intended to be a narratological category, in the...