ABSTRACT
This chapter will try to find out how travel literature is used for cartographic goals: to control, order or limn a place. In instituting an analogy between the discipline of geography and the art of writing, literature of travel pinpoints location and ushers untrammelled places into recognition by orienting them according to a coordinate system that unifies the globe, or views the globe as a totality. However, this chapter will demonstrate how English travel texts moving horizontally through space are syntactically linear and narratologically similar, seldom becoming anything other than a practice in cartographic reasoning. My objective here is to see English travel, specifically nature and aesthetic travel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as experiments in the spatial construction of Great Britain, successfully implemented in the homeland and metropolis, and simultaneously extended to spaces outside.
