ABSTRACT
Whereas the eighteenth century had proposed a reassuring, ‘enlightened’ model of the psyche, stabilized by reasoned definition and exhibiting all the cohesion of a well-tuned, visible mechanism, the nineteenth century found itself wrestling with alternative perspectives which granted space to mystery and imbalance. The hallmarks of Romantic thought were its accentuation of unconstrained impulse and its de-emphasizing of rationality as the shaping principle of art. Romantic writers, painters and musicians placed ever greater store by the individual imagination, cherishing those peak experiences wherein the creative spirit sheds the fetters of humdrum circumstance. This chapter will sketch a silhouette of the Romantic sensibility by identifying just one of its manifold manifestations-the literary and artistic documentation of the experience of travel-as representative of the whole. If one accepts that the artistic output of Romanticism was governed by an urge to transcend the familiar and the commonplace, then its practice of journeying into unknown territories may be said to have functioned as a fundamental trope for aesthetic and psychic exploration.
