Travel Literature in and from the Medite

This course will study various forms of travel writing within, from, and to the Mediterranean in the long nineteenth century. Throughout the semester, you will read a number of travel accounts to develop your understanding of these particular sources and reflect on the theoretical discussions and the themes framing them, namely orientalism, postcolonial studies, imaginative geographies, literature between fiction and reality, Romantic and autobiographical writing, gender, sexuality and the body, the rise of archeology, adventurism, mass migration and tourism. We will focus on Italian travel writers visiting the Ottoman Empire and the Americas (Cristina di Belgioioso, Gaetano Osculati, Edmondo de Amicis) and others visiting the Italian peninsula (Grand Tourists, Madame De Staël), and we will study the real or imaginary travels of French, British and American writers to the Eastern Mediterranean and to antique and holy lands (Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, Count Marcellus, Austen Henry Layard, Lord Byron, Mark Twain), as well as Arabic travel writers to the West (Rifāʻah Rāfiʻ al-Ṭahṭāwī).