ABSTRACT
Sentimentality and sensibilité began asserting themselves in travel writing about the same time science did, from the 1760s on. By the time Mungo Park’s Travels appeared in 1799, it found readerships already primed on sentimental dramatizations of the contact zone, many of them generated by the abolitionist movement. Sex and slavery are great themes of this literature. Or a single great theme, perhaps, for the two invariably appear together in allegorical narratives that invoke conjugal love as an alternative to enslavement and colonial domination, or as newly legitimated versions of them.
