The first book of its kind to study the Romantic obsession with the "antique lands" of Ethiopia, Egypt, India, and Mexico, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing is an important contribution to the recent wave of interest in exotic travel writing. Drawing generously on both original texts and modern scholarship in literature, history, geography, and anthropology, it focuses on the unstable discourse of "curiosity" to offer an important reformulation of the relations between literature, aesthetics, and colonialism in the period.

• Introduction: Practices and Narratives of Romantic Travel


• 1: Cycles of Accumulation, Curiosity, and Temporal Exchange


• 2: Curious Narratives and the Problem of Credit: James Bruce's 'Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile'


• 3: 'Young Menmon' and Romantic Egyptomania


• 4: Indian Travel Writing and the Imperial Picturesque


• 5: Domesticating Distance: Three Women Travel Writers in British India


• 6: Alexander von Humboldt and the Romantic Imagination of America


• Conclusion: William Bullock's Mexico and the Reassertion of Popular Curiosity


• Bibliography


• Index