Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘How Bursts the Landscape on my Sight!’: Pedestrian Excursions into the Romantic Landscape
- 2 At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality
- 3 Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions: Eighteenth-Century Literary Tourism in Scotland
- 4 ‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime: The Landscape and Geology of the Trossachs in The Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–9)
- 5 Readers of Romantic Locality: Tourists, Loch Katrine and The Lady of the Lake
- 6 Paradox Inn: Home and Passing Through at Grasmere
- 7 ‘O all pervading Album!’: Place and Displacement in Romantic Albums and Album Poetry
- 8 Into the Woods: Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest in the Romantic Imagination
- 9 Inspiration, Toleration and Relocation in Ann Radcliffe's A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795)
- 10 Henry Crabb Robinson's Initiation into the ‘Mysteries of the New School’: A Romantic Journey
- 11 Italy as a Romantic Location in the Poetry of the Original English Della Cruscans
- 12 The Location of Vacancy: Pompeii and the Panorama
- 13 Italy Visited and Revisited: Wordsworth's ‘Magnificent Debt’
- 14 Hollow Skies, Hupaithric Temples and Pythagoreans: Shelley's Dim Crotonian Truths
- 15 ‘An Imaginary Line Drawn through Waste and Wilderness’: Scott's The Talisman
- 16 Exploded Convictions, Perished Certainties: The Transformational Experience of the South Seas in Georg Forster's A Voyage Round the World
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
16 - Exploded Convictions, Perished Certainties: The Transformational Experience of the South Seas in Georg Forster's A Voyage Round the World
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘How Bursts the Landscape on my Sight!’: Pedestrian Excursions into the Romantic Landscape
- 2 At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality
- 3 Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions: Eighteenth-Century Literary Tourism in Scotland
- 4 ‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime: The Landscape and Geology of the Trossachs in The Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–9)
- 5 Readers of Romantic Locality: Tourists, Loch Katrine and The Lady of the Lake
- 6 Paradox Inn: Home and Passing Through at Grasmere
- 7 ‘O all pervading Album!’: Place and Displacement in Romantic Albums and Album Poetry
- 8 Into the Woods: Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest in the Romantic Imagination
- 9 Inspiration, Toleration and Relocation in Ann Radcliffe's A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795)
- 10 Henry Crabb Robinson's Initiation into the ‘Mysteries of the New School’: A Romantic Journey
- 11 Italy as a Romantic Location in the Poetry of the Original English Della Cruscans
- 12 The Location of Vacancy: Pompeii and the Panorama
- 13 Italy Visited and Revisited: Wordsworth's ‘Magnificent Debt’
- 14 Hollow Skies, Hupaithric Temples and Pythagoreans: Shelley's Dim Crotonian Truths
- 15 ‘An Imaginary Line Drawn through Waste and Wilderness’: Scott's The Talisman
- 16 Exploded Convictions, Perished Certainties: The Transformational Experience of the South Seas in Georg Forster's A Voyage Round the World
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
In July 1772, seventeen-year-old Georg Forster embarked on Captain Cook's Resolution to accompany and help his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, who, after Sir Joseph Banks's withdrawal and upon his recommendation, had become the chief scientist of Captain Cook's second voyage to the South Seas (1772–5). Barely five years later, Georg Forster, still only twenty-two, published his voluminous account of this voyage of discovery, entitled A Voyage Round the World – according to Nigel Leask ‘a milestone for romantic period travel writing’. Robert L. Kahn, the editor of the Voyage in the Akademie Ausgabe of the works of Forster, considers it ‘the finest work with regard to style and power of expression to have come out of the three expeditions of Cook and one of the greatest travelogues written in any tongue or age’ – an assessment with which Bernard Smith concurs: Forster's Voyage, writes Smith, is ‘the best written account to issue from all three of Cook's voyages.’
But A Voyage Round the World is not only remarkable for its style. It is also a radical intervention into the burgeoning European discourse of the South Seas, and of Tahiti in particular, as it was established by Jean Louis Antoine de Bougainville's Voyage autour du monde (1771) and John Hawkesworth's redacted compilation An Account of the Voyages … (1773) – a discourse with which young Georg Forster was thoroughly familiar: after all, it was he who had translated de Bougainville’s seminal account into English, in the same year that the Resolution set sail to discover the great southern continent, terra australis incognita, or, as Captain Cook thought more likely, to once and for all disprove its existence.
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- Information
- Romantic LocalitiesEurope Writes Place, pp. 221 - 236Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014