Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Maioli, Roger

Titel

Minds in Motion: Imagining Empiricism in Eighteenth-Century British Travel Literature by Anne M. Thell (review)

Ist Teil von

• Eighteenth - Century Studies, 2020-10, Vol.54 (1), p.239-241

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Increasingly, the book shows, readers of travelogues demanded not just descriptive exactitude but “pleasure in the form of vicarious experience . . . which is enabled by the literary and imaginative strategies ostensibly disavowed by scientific authors” (9). Lord Kames’s notion of ideal presence, which travel writers from Defoe onwards autonomously recognized, “captures the yearning for first-hand experience at the heart of empiricism and connects suggestively to those travel authors who insist that reading is a valid form of experience” (24). Readers invested in the pre-digital history of virtual reality will find much to like here, but the discussion would have yielded a more balanced picture of intellectual history had it explored the frailty of Defoe’s alternative, implicit in his unwillingness to acknowledge that the New Voyage is a work of fiction.