Editor's Introduction

Our title for this special edition contains a proposition: literature travels as a condition of its being, defining itself as 'literature' by testing and transgressing the boundaries of communities. European national literatures, emerging alongside notions of the nation state in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, similarly are involved in international negotiations and alignments by virtue of a combination of factors: the increasing mobility of readers; the work of translators; the rise of foreign correspondence and reviewing; the influence of expatriate communities of writers and readers; the globalization of publishing, including 'offshore' pirate presses; the reception of travellers' accounts by host communities; and, perhaps most crucial to our concerns here, the emergence of mass tourism as a mode of leisure and consumption. John Towner has suggested that the permeation of travel and tourism through recreation, artistic production, reading and observation since the early nineteenth century in Europe amounts to a 'travel culture'.¹ Dean MacCannell argues that tourism itself is like an aesthetic, involving the repeated and ritualised consumption of sights, yet preserving in this experience a desire for authenticity (although never authenticity itself). Tourism as artifice, thus, becomes the sign of modernity's nostalgia for the integration of a reality that seems fragmented, distant, and disparate.² More recently, Nicola Watson considers the relations of literary tourism – following the footsteps of authors and their fictions – and 'realist strategies in nineteenth-century narrative', suggesting that while authors construct fictional worlds that can be toured by readers, tourism itself transforms readers and reading, generating a new sense of place as text.³ In such criticism – and in the essays that make up this issue – literature and tourism are involved in a system of relations and ratifications between imagined and lived experience with profound importance to our understanding of ourselves, the way in which we represent ourselves in art and culture, and our place in the world of nations and inter-nations.

This symbiosis between fiction and travel emerges with the turn to modernity, before which the charge of travel liar was the bugbear of every travel writer.⁴ By the late eighteenth century, however, travel authenticity and aesthetic apperception merged, a collective imaginary perhaps typified by the popularity of optical entertainments such as the panorama, the theatre of painting-in-the-round that brought the verisimilitude of tourist sights to metropolitan centres, notably London and Paris.⁵ The panorama reproduces travel as spectacle even as it renders mobility supplementary to the experience of travel, thereby preserving and underscoring what Mary Louise Pratt calls the 'imperial eye'⁶ of the observer-spectator: the world is brought home. Such aestheticised surveillance of the foreign has its late nineteenth-century antipodes in Joris-Karl Huysmans À rebours (1884), a title imperfectly rendered in English as Against Nature, but, according to a recent editor, also interpretable in the context of the French, 'faire un trajet à rebours, to make a journey the other way round'.⁷ Huysmans's decadent protagonist, Des Esseintes, travels to London by not travelling, so permeated has Paris become with English reading rooms (the famous premises of Galignani's Messenger) and English commercial haunts (the Bodega) that the experience of London (which is no more than the experience of a London popularised by and amalgamated from the novels of Dickens) is as available at home as it would have been abroad: 'Il s'acagnarda dans ce Londres fictif, heureux d'être à l'abri, […] À quoi bon bouger, quand on peut voyager si magnifiquement sur une chaise?' (He settled down comfortably in his fictional London, happy to be indoors. […] What was the point of moving, when one could travel so splendidly just sitting in a chair).⁸ Ironically, it is in the environs of a railway station, the Mecca of the 'real' traveller, that Des Esseintes' disinclination to travel turns into a resolve not to. Unlike the panorama, in which illusion of presence nevertheless preserves international relations and colonial hierarchies, Huysmans's vision is of a new transnational aesthetic language, in which images and associations with wider European culture coalesce or divide to form fleeting notions or impressions of national identity. In other words...