Perceptions of Germany in British Travel Literature

Dimitrios Kassis

Nov 2019 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

As part of the “beaten track”, Germany did not conform to the Grand Tourist ideals of eighteenth-century British travellers that were influenced by the spirit of the Enlightenment, and, therefore, sought to trace vestiges of the Greco-Roman cultural tradition in their ventures across the continent. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the German landscape becomes the central theme of British travel discourse, marking the gradual shift of focus from the “saturated” image of classical Greece to the rediscovery of the Old Germanic culture of the sagas.

Driven by an antiquarian interest in the German context, British travellers discovered Germany in the wake of the nineteenth century, when the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire not only signalled French expansionism in Protestant Europe, but also stimulated the appetite of the Victorians for the exploration of the German culture in an attempt to define themselves as being of pure Teutonic stock. Given the strenuous struggle of German thinkers to deal with the feelings of humiliation and shame caused by the Napoleonic rule, and, in view of a potential Gallicisation, nineteenth-century Germans mastered the fields of comparative philology and Northern antiquarianism to transform their political weakness into a new cultural paradigm that not only fostered pan-Germanism through the rediscovery of the folk tales and legends of their medieval tradition, but also ascribed to Germany a superior spiritual role, which was later incorporated into the racial discourses of Germany and Britain.

This book is concerned with the views of British travel writers, focusing on travel narratives produced from 1794 until 1845. As such, it sheds light on instances which pertain to the representation of Germanness in relation to the British national context.

About the author

Dimitrios Kassis holds a PhD from the Faculty of English Studies of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. He received a Master’s degree in Education Studies (with Distinction) from Roehampton University, UK, and a Master’s degree in Translation Studies from the Department of French Language and Literature of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He speaks 18 foreign languages and his academic interests are connected with travel literature, translation and language studies. He is the author of the books Representations of the North in Victorian Travel Literature; American Travellers in Scandinavia; Icelandic Utopia in Victorian Travel Literature; Greek Dystopia in British Women Travellers’ Discourse; and Images of Irishness in Nineteenth-Century Travel Literature. He is currently working as an English teacher in the public sector.