In this Book
- Are We There Yet?: Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism
- Book
- 2012
- Published by: University of Michigan Press
Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism connects the Victorian fascination with "virtual travel" with the rise of realism in nineteenth-century fiction and twenty-first-century experiments in virtual reality. Even as the expansion of river and railway networks in the nineteenth century made travel easier than ever before, staying at home and fantasizing about travel turned into a favorite pastime. New ways of representing place—360-degree panoramas, foldout river maps, exhaustive railway guides—offered themselves as substitutes for actual travel. Thinking of these representations as a form of "virtual travel" reveals a surprising continuity between the Victorian fascination with imaginative dislocation and twenty-first -century efforts to use digital technology to expand the physical boundaries of the self.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- pp. vii-viii
- I. Going Nowhere: Panoramic Travel
- pp. 29-35
- 4. Watching the Grand Tour
- pp. 55-58
- 7. The Hypothetical Tourist
- pp. 70-82
- 2. Journey to the Interior
- pp. 97-104
- 3. You Are Here: The Guided Tour
- pp. 104-110
- 4. Blogging the Trip: Three Men in a Boat
- pp. 111-117
- 5. Back to the Future: News from Nowhere
- pp. 117-122
- 6. River of Oblivion: The London Thames
- pp. 122-133
- 7. Change of Pace: The Rush toward Leisure
- pp. 134-142
- 1. Frankenstein’s Monster: The Cyborg Engine
- pp. 152-154
- 3. User’s Manuals: The Railway Guide
- pp. 167-173
- 4. Chat Rooms: The Social Space of Trains
- pp. 173-181
- 8. Moving through Media
- pp. 200-204
- Conclusion
- pp. 204-208
- Works Cited
- pp. 225-244