Travel Writing in Victorian Periodicals: Media Forms and Cultural Work

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Barbara Korte
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2022 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 496202168

The project is a contribution to British cultural studies and investigates the representation of travel in general-interest periodicals for the period 1850–1900, when Britain played a leading role in the rise of tourism and the rapid expansion of the periodicals market. This nexus between travel and periodicals culture has been largely ignored because travel writing research has tended to focus on book publications. The project aims to demonstrate how Victorian periodicals configured the representation of travel according to their media logic, and how this media-specific representation went hand in hand with cultural functions (or cultural work). The project proposes that general-interest periodicals helped to inscribe travel into Victorian culture and to familiarise their readers with ideas of travel, its discourses and practices. Two media-specific aspects are of central importance here: firstly, general-interest periodicals typically presented mixed content and enlaced travel with other themes of Victorian culture; secondly, periodicals addressed different segments of the reading audience. The Victorian interest in travel can thus be explored with a wider social range and a more fine-grained social classification than for travel books. The project identifies a special importance of periodicals for mediating travel to people whose opportunities for travel were limited by economic and/or social restraints. Among other factors, this was enabled by the fact that periodicals can represent travel in single articles – a small form suitable for depicting small (cheap and modest) forms of travel. The project investigates a corpus of 7 periodicals for different audiences, with established methods and concepts of cultural periodical studies. It develops a new perspective for the study of nineteenth-century travel culture and travel writing, but it can also serve as a historical foil for more recent constellations of travel and everyday media such as television and today’s social media.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants