ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter I have argued that romance is a technology that encourages readers to invest in an unknown world and prepares the way for the domesticating energies of the novel. Although romance conventions were incorporated into the novel at the beginning and end of the century, romance was a much more integral part of various other genres up until midcentury. Writers whose projects differed from one another’s as widely as Lord Byron’s romantic epics and John Murray’s mass tourism guides made use of romance conventions, such as presenting space, or what Northrop Frye called the “world,” as natural and outside of history. Romance was especially popular among travel writers. The social reformer Harriet Martineau, for example, relied upon romance conventions for her 1848 account of her trip to the Middle East, Eastern Life, Present and Past, as did Florence Nightingale in her narrative of her Nile journey, Letters from Egypt 1849-1850.
