ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses travel and exploration literature of Britain and Europe, America, Africa, the South Seas, and the East during the Romantic period. The travel literature is the single most powerful resource for understanding how the rest of the world was constructed in the eyes of British Romantic readers. The literature of American travel comprises works of exploration arising from the progressive opening up of the continent to European settlers, and works of a more touristic nature dedicated to non-utilitarian perspectives on those parts of the country that had been discovered. The chapter looks at some popular travel books on different parts of Africa, published over a ten-year period, and shows how the literature of exploration keys into this intricate and unstable context. The picturesque 'conquest' of India was pursued with equal enthusiasm by women writers, who came in increasing numbers in the early nineteenth century as the wives or daughters of East India Company employees or military men.
