Rites of passage: Inventions of self and community in eighteenth-century British travel literature

The eighteenth century witnessed an explosion in the production of travel literature, whose output "was second only to theology." This dissertation considers what kind of cultural needs travel writing fulfilled: moving beyond the traditional view that the genre merely serves up facts about the world, I argue that travel writing actively constructs the world as it tracks the traveler in the process of negotiating boundaries that demarcate communities and cultures and the positioning of persons in them. The genre's capacity to structure the way people understand themselves and their habitat takes on heightened importance in the eighteenth century for it is at this time that England changes both within its own borders (becoming that new entity called "Great Britain") and as an international presence. The changes England underwent were problematic in the eyes of contemporaries. Determining what kind of nation England (or Great Britain) should be and who its primary citizens ought to be were highly contested issues. Travel literature, I argue, participated in this complex socio-cultural negotiation. I show how travel literature functioned in the eighteenth century as a medium for the construction of new national, social, and civic identities.; Part I analyzes the travel narratives of Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett to show how they constitute elaborate rituals of citizen formation that at the same time outline (both optimistically and ominously) new models of polity and new paradigms of the social order. Part II treats the works of female travelers, focusing on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Wollstonecraft: it demonstrates how these narratives constitute radical acts of self-assertion that invent novel concepts of personhood, citizenship, and community--concepts that indirectly critique and serve as alternatives to those articulated by the male authors analyzed in part I.