ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Radcliffe's superimposition of the English garden onto an Italian landscape draws on a broadly used mode of representation that assesses continental landscapes, and by extension cultures and government, according to British models while simultaneously recognizing their native or 'natural' properties. In both Radcliffe's novels and the travel writing of the 1790s, superimposition functions as both a defensive and an aggressive rhetorical strategy, reflecting the tension between the nationalist and cosmopolitan ideas of Europe that was most influentially formulated in Edmund Burke's response to the French Revolution and its aftermath. The changing patterns of representation in British narratives of European travel were associated with a new idea of Europe that emerged in the revolutionary decade. The French Revolutionary Wars and later Napoleonic Wars disrupted the traditional itinerary of the Grand Tour and Napoleon's attempts to impose uniformity on conquered European territories undermined the inherited ideas of Europe residual in the eighteenth-century ideal of a shared civilization.
