| The figure of the wanderer, by virtue of its claims to detachment from any particular place, came to renewed importance in the literature of the second half of the eighteenth century. It replaces and updates the metaphor of the "prospect" overview, and in the process exchanges stability for mobility, detachment for sympathy. I argue that this marks a vital shift from the old idea of the detached observer of society in that it is necessarily an ambiguous figure---connoting both vision and vulnerability, or ideally and more specifically, vision through vulnerability.; This dissertation investigates the relationship between an increasing interest in wandering found in British texts of the late eighteenth century, and shifting ideas about sympathy, sociability, and people's relations to the feelings of others. The prominence that literary texts of the 1780s and 1790s in particular give to the ambivalence of wandering distinguishes them both from the sentimental traveler and the Romantic one. In them the liberating, enabling, and visionary itinerancy of the journey threatens to become a nightmare version of itself: wandering at every moment risks becoming homelessness, exile, or relentless motion continued only because a person has no other choice. This ambivalence produces ambivalent texts---texts that wanderer as much as their protagonists do, moving into other texts through quotations, or the blurring of genres.; In the first two chapters, through focusing on poetry, I explore how uses of the wanderer changed between the 1730s and the 1790s. I focus on two transitional moments: the shift from the prospect view of Thomson's landscape poems to Goldsmith's new figure of the traveller-poet; and the progressively more alienated figurations of wandering within Charlotte Smith's sonnets written over the last two decades of the century. Through readings of prose works by Smith, Radcliffe and Wollstonecraft, the following chapters examine ways in which double figurations of wandering were then concentrated on single, often female, figures. Through this ambivalence I trace a trajectory of wandering between the man of feeling and the Romantic wanderer, and map out a distinct tradition which arises in between---that of the "reluctant wanderer."... |
