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Martha Pollak emphasizes the role of military considerations in historic urbancartography. Asserting the importance of urban fortification and defence, she presentsthem as the source of the prolific cartographic movement of seventeenth-century Europeand argues that they came to influence the form and perception of the city. DavidBuisseret describes collections of city models and emphasizes the value of the modelapproach:

When a large body of people needs to be rapidly acquainted with the outlines of a city,there is no substitute for a model of it, as many tourist centres of our time have cometo realize. In short, to portray the city it is often best to model it (p. 142).

Gerald Danzer offers an account of Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago in whichit is shown to encapsulate views of the city and of urban life. This handsome, heavily-illustrated volume invites consideration of the more recent situation and particularlyof the difficulty of presenting cities. In most urban maps cities emerge as the spacesbetween streets. Differences within the city, for example of wealth, or environmentalor housing quality, are ignored. The perceptions that create and reflect senses of urbanspace, often rival, contested and atavistic, are neglected, in favour of a bland uniformbackground that is described, and thus explained, insofar as there is any explanation,in terms of roads.

University of Exeter J B

doi:10.1006/jhge.2001.0305, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

J E and J-P R (Eds), Voyages and Visions: Towards a CulturalHistory of Travel (London: Reaktion Books, 1999. Pp. viii+344. £16.95); C C,Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography1600–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Pp. ix+278. £16.99).

At first glance, these two books could scarcely be more different. Voyages and Visionsattempts the impossible task of covering virtually the entire history of “western” travelfrom the sixteenth century onwards, drawing on perspectives from a wide range ofdisciplines and focusing on case-studies from the USA to Europe, India to Mexico,and even into interstellar regions. Chloe Chard’s book, by contrast, is almost impossiblyspecific in its terms of reference. Explicitly eschewing “social history” and focusingupon the much visited terrain of the Grand Tour between 1600–1830, she is solelyconcerned with “the changes and discontinuities in the forms of language employed intravel writing” (p. 12). Taken together, however, these books illustrate the growth ofscholarship in travel-related fields over the past decade, plus the enormous scope thatsuch study offers, as well as the high quality and fecundity of the output. It is notsimply that travel is now being analysed from a range of theoretical and disciplinaryperspectives, but that the question of travel is locating itself within these disciplines asa valid concern. For example, travel writing has become an excepted form of literature,an appropriate focus for literary studies along with other texts. Similarly, issues oftravel and travel writing lie at the core of disciplines such as anthropology andgeography, forcing a re-evaluation of long-accepted epistemological and methodologicalframeworks. The collection of exotic objects and their display, plus the rituals of theirviewing, are highly pertinent not only to anthropology, archeology and museology, but

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to history, sociology and cultural studies. Themes associated with travel are not onlyan obvious focus for studies in orientalism and post-colonialism but also lie at the veryheart of these disciplines. The impact of travel on everyday life in western societies,from food and eating to landscape gardening, from clothing to architecture, from artand literature to religion, has also been profound. The vast movements of exiles,refugees and migrants, as well as the cultural and environmental impact of travel onrecipient cultures, are of vital importance.

Of course, neither volume can hope to successfully cover such scholarly and culturaldiversity but each attempts, in almost opposite ways, to enlist a broad spectrum ofperspectives. The approach of Voyages and Visions is centrifugal, scattering itself acrosstime, place and disciplines. At its core is an extremely lengthy and erudite introductionby the editors Jas Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubies, which sets itself the task of holding thecollection together and displaying it to good advantage. The introduction sets up travelas being integral to crucial problems associated with modernity, especially the way inwhich modernity was “constituted in opposition to a past, for which there is also adesire” (p. 7), particularly a desire for an ideal wholeness to counter what was perceivedto be the intense fragmentation, both social and spiritual, of modernity. Various modelsof western travel are carefully mapped, from shifts in the paradigm of early Christianpilgrimage and its encounter with the terrain of pagan Antiquity, to the later emphasison journeys to the Holy Land; from Celtic Christianity’s allegorical pilgrimages withtravel itself as a form of worship, to the establishment of pilgrimage, crusade andchivalry as the three essential modes by which medieval Europe invested travel withsacred significance. The collapse of this paradigm and the emergence, in the Renaissance,of ones based on missionary zeal, ethnography and naturalism is closely related to therise of European imperialism. The introduction concludes by focusing on tourism. Thevery sweep of this introduction creates problems as the authors are forced to makeoften-reductive categorisations. Tourism, for example, unlike earlier, medieval para-digms, receives scant coverage and its complexities are reduced to a single dismissiveremark. Given that all the other chapters in the book that this introduction purportsto introduce basically focus on travel from the sixteenth century onwards, it seemssomewhat inappropriate that this ‘recent’ historical period receives barely a few pagesin a 56-page essay. The introduction also makes scarce mention of concepts aroundissues of orientalism, postcolonialism, gender, and representation that are crucial tounderstanding the place of travel within modernity. Such deficiencies, however, areovercome when the book is read as a whole.

By contrast, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour is centripetal, drawing in, ratherthan scattering, diverse scholarly perspectives into an elucidation of a narrow field ofvision: certain rhetorical strategies of travel writing associated with the experience ofpleasure. The historical span is quite broad but the geographical parameters are confinedto the most rigorous definition of the Grand Tour. A chapter in Voyages and Visionssimilarly focuses on this crucial paradigm of travel and, with its broader culturalemphasis, highlights just how precisely Chloe Chard has set the boundaries of herstudy. Again, the introduction is a mixture of scholarly erudition and rather sweeping,reductive categorizations, particularly when it comes to late nineteenth and twentiethcentury travel paradigms. Tourism, for example, again receives short shrift in a scholarlywork, being reduced to the metaphor of an “escape”. Also, I’m not convinced that thedomain of “imaginative geography” can be separated from that of “social history”quite so easily as Chard insists, nor indeed, am I quite sure what she means by eitherterm (p. 14). Does “social history” include cultural and political history? Does the term“imaginative geography” refer to Edward Said’s use of it in his work Orientalism?Nevertheless, the book generates numerous important insights about the ways in whichdescriptions of landscape conform to the imperatives of various forms of pleasure and

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guilt. I found her careful elucidation of the gender issues, both in terms of authors andin terms of their classification of experiences and places, to be particularly rich andinsightful. Overall, this is a fine piece of careful scholarship. Extremely well-written,even if at times over-elaborate both in detail and in its rhetoric, it is a valuable addition,not just to the already extensive scholarship of ‘The Grand Tour’, but to the study oftravel writing and its construction of landscape.

Voyages and Visions, on the other hand, is by the very nature of being a collectionby different authors, more eclectic in its styles of writing and its conceptual concerns.There is not a single chapter which fails to generate insights and which is built uponcareless scholarship. I was drawn to Peter Hansen’s excellent chapter on the relationshipbetween guides and their clients in the European Alps and the Himalayas, both becauseof my own interests and also because it moves away from the extensive focus on literarysources that characterizes some of the other chapters. It also explores the “transculturalexchange between hosts and guests” (p. 211), something that can so easily be overlooked.While I found Edward James’s chapter on interstellar travel to be well written andinteresting, I felt it really was stretching the boundaries and framework of a volumethat was already in danger of losing its coherence. Indeed, this lack of any clear theme,with some chapters attempting overviews (“Narratives of Travel in Sixteenth-CenturyAmerica”; “The European Journey in Postwar American Fiction and Film”) and otherschoosing a far more narrow focus (“Montaigne on Pilgrimage”; “Bernier’s Orient”),results in a work that feels more encyclopaedic than a cohesive and sustained in-vestigation of the cultural history of travel. This is where the introduction, despite itserudition, could have been more useful. It could have sketched out the parameters ofthe volume and discussed how each of the 10 chapters addressed specific key issues.Nevertheless, by virtue of its audacious project, one which, compared with say theGrand Tour, has received only limited scholarly focus, as well as the high quality ofits contributions, Voyages and Visions is an important and timely contribution to thestudy of travel.

University of South Australia P B

doi:10.1006/jhge.2001.0306, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

A G (Ed.), Romantic Geographies: Discourses of travel 1775–1884 (Man-chester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Pp. xii+260. £17.99 paperback).

Rarely does an edited work not have one chapter which digresses from the commonpurpose or drops below the rest in standard, style or interest, but Amanda Gilroy’sRomantic Geographies is such a rarity. This collection is uniformly excellent. Part of itssuccess emerges from the fact that it takes a relatively narrow brief—travel writing ofthe Romantic period. The authors of specialized chapters are steeped in the sameliteratures and, as a consequence, the book reads as a whole, rather than a patchwork.Few readers will be tempted to skim. The overall purpose of the collection is todemonstrate the importance of travel and travel writing in the construction of aestheticsand morals at a time of rapid change. The Romantic movement coincided with theFrench Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, imperialism, slavery, the Industrial Re-volution; notions of gender, class and nation were all in a state of flux. The contributorsto this book work though the many facets of the role of travel as a strategy employedby relatively wealthy and educated people to write themselves into the drama of theera. All of the texts considered demonstrated a strong sense of the liminal, using

2001 Academic Press