ABSTRACT
Description – etymologically writing ‘away from’ – involves distance, memory, a remove from experience, and in travel writing raises the problem of how one linguistically negotiates the distance between experience and representation, or how one best represents the truth of experience, both in terms of the objects seen on tour and of the way in which the traveller sees them. This chapter addresses these problems by considering description as ekphrasis, a verbal-visual rhetorical mode that prizes the illusion of immediacy. Considering travel writings on the Wye tour in the early to mid-nineteenth century, the chapter asks whether redescription can transcend belatedness – the following in the footsteps (physically and rhetorically) of others – and paradoxically express freedom in restraint, expressive agency in excess of rhetorical patterning.
