PARADIGMS OF PLACE IN TRAVEL LITERATURE: THE ORIENTAL VOYAGES OF NERVAL, BURTON, KINGLAKE, AND CHATEAUBRIAND (FRANCE, ENGLAND

This dissertation examines the concept of place as an integral feature of travel literature; first, as the necessary grounds for being which permit travel, and secondly, as a paradigm imposed by the traveller upon his perception and description of places visited. The two main paradigms for place are (a) those generated by attitudes which value sameness (seen in the chauvinistic model) and (b) those which negate one's own place to aspire to the place of the other (as in the xenophiliac model associated with the Romantic movement). The philosophical ground of the introduction draws upon the thought of Heidegger and phenomenologically-based theories of place used in the works of geographers, Yi-Fu Tuan and E. W. Relph, as well as the works of social theorists, Alan F. Blum and Peter McHugh. The subsequent chapters of this dissertation explore the Oriental voyages of two French and two English travellers in the nineteenth century in an effort to relate the paradigms of place held by each to their narrative points of view and descriptive strategies. The paradigm of the Oriental as "other" place serves in the production of narrative structures and stances, reflecting attitudes of loss or appropriation in the metaphoric colonization which constitutes place description.;In chapter one, Gerard de Nerval's Voyage en Orient is analyzed as an example of the Romantic paradigm of place, which seeks union with the lost maternal source residing in the place of the other. Sir Richard Burton's Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah is discussed in chapter two with respect to its concept of place as order, and its use of conventions to display a scientific disguise. The following chapter relates Burton's posture of deflected distance to Alexander Kinglake's sense of place as the inconvertible separateness of an individual and an English identity. Chapter four, "Chateaubriand: Closing the Circle," focuses on the issues of identity and the literary pilgrimage, treating Chateaubriand's Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem et de Jerusalem a Paris as an example of a literary archive through which the self-proclaimed "last" Frenchman and pilgrim voyages to secure his place.;In the final chapter, the focus turns from place to placelessness in a discussion of the conceptions and literary treatments of the desert as a paradigmatically "other" or anti-place. The epilogue compares the four travellers by plotting their relative places in the metaphor of life as a voyage.