Fitzjames I, Merton
17:00 - 18:30
Drinks and nibbles provided
Rebecca Loxton (Keble)
The representation of the foreigner in panoramic literature of the long nineteenth century
Abstract
Panoramic literature was a term devised by Walter Benjamin to define the different types of literature produced in the 19th century, the objective of which was to survey the modern city and its different social types. Examples of panoramic literature published during this period include guidebooks, physiolgoies and encyclopedias. There was a proliferation of guidebooks published during the 19th century, aimed at foreigners and provincials visiting Paris during this period which saw the expansion of European travel, and in the mid-century there was a sudden explosion of physiologies, books which claimed to be able to identify the recognisable characteristics of different social types, 'the foreigner' being one of these. Some texts are accompanied by caricaturial images, which often provide an interesting addition to the text. My research will look at many different examples of panoramic literature in order to determine how the foreigner (and to a lesser extent, the provincial) is represented in texts of this time and to evaluate whether this representation changed over time, or from one text to another.
Rebecca Loxton read for an undergraduate degree in Modern Languages at the University of Sussex before coming to Oxford. She now reading for an MPhil in Modern Languages at Keble, and is in the early stages of writing her thesis.
Emma Pauncefort (UCL)
Béat Louis de Muralt’s Lettres sur les Anglois et les Francois et sur les Voïages: a literary progenitor for Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques
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Abstract
In 1693, Colsoni published his Guide de Londres Pour les Estrangers dedié & offert aux voyageurs Allemands et François, offering short tours of the capital which might permit the traveller to appreciate its physical landmarks. Such a work complimented earlier ‘travel literature’ on England which predominantly sought to relate a topographical description of the country, reserving comment on the English character for the purpose of rehearsing the hackneyed and entrenched negative stereotype of English depravity and even barbarism. At the hands of the Swiss traveller Muralt, French ‘travel literature’ on England was, however, about to take a dramatically new direction. The letters written during and following his sojourn in England in 1694 and first published fully in 1725, respond and vie with both the literary and thematic traditions of the travel account. Muralt does not just eschew topography and the reiteration of unchallenged stereotypes, but demonstrates how the rélation can evidence literary flair in tackling its renewed subject matter. This paper will seek to show how exactly Muralt does this, and in turn advocate his work as a vital literary progenitor of the Voltaire’s later Lettres Philosophiques which have hitherto dominated scholarly attention.
Emma Pauncefort is currently in the first year of a PhD under the supervision of Dr Isabelle Moreau in the French department at University College London. An interest from undergraduate level in the fascination with ‘Englishness’ in eighteenth-century France revealed the absence of scholarship seeking to understand this phenomenon in relation to the accounts of those who actually travelled to England. Through the course of the PhD, it is her hope to thicken the context of Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques which are often attributed with sparking Anglomania in France, and bring ‘travel literature’, the most read genre after the novel in the eighteenth century, to the forefront. In so doing, she also seeks to supplement existing empirical studies of travel accounts by subjecting little-read texts to extended literary analysis.
