Page - 13 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Birgit Englert, Sandra Vlasta | Travel Writing 13 than not) intricate relationship between ‘text’ and ‘image’ in travel writing. The intention was to combine the study of the travelogue as text (and image) with an awareness of the mobility that precedes the texts, is inscribed in them, and is therefore re-performed in the act of reading and watching. Moreover, the diversity of the texts and analyses highlights once again the hete- rogeneous nature of travel writing as a genre and the extent to which the critical vocabulary of travel writing studies and mobility studies can help us to read it. Text may qualify as image, and ekphrasis is the most commonly known form of this kind of verbalization of pictures. In the nineteenth century in particular, many travelogues were presented as pictures. Fanny Lewald called her book on her stay in Italy Italienisches Bil- derbuch (1847, Italian Picture Book), for instance, although there are no pictures at all in the volume. The same is true of Heinrich Heine’s Reisebilder (1826–1831, Travel Pictures), which again consisted of text alone. As shown above, the two authors were not the only ones at the time to use the metaphor of pictures to refer to their travel experiences. Of course, these texts are not examples of ekphrasis in the classical sense, i.e. they are not descriptions of paintings or other visual works of art. Rather, the impression of the journey is understood and conveyed as a picture — a precursor to the actual photographs that later travellers would bring home from their journeys. Similarly, Lewald and her contemporaries were aware of the individual aspects of their pictures, of their snapshot-like quality; indeed, they emphasized this facet in the titles of their travelogues. At the same time, the authors often referred to images that were well known to their readers. A travelogue on Italy, for instance, will have referred to certain places, monu- ments, works of art, and everyday commodities with which readers would have been familiar from earlier reports. In this way, images are also mobile; they migrate from travelogue to trave- logue and may be transformed along the journey, as it were. In his contribution on Jean-Fran- çois Regnard’s pastiche La Provençale (The Provençal), written in the late seventeenth century and published in 1731, Daniel Winkler analyses the various intermedial references in the text, which can be understood as a differentiated mobile inventory of images, all expressed in the form of text. La Provençale is an example of early modern Barbary Coast literature, which has often been discussed as a subgenre of travel narratives. While much research on this subgenre had previously focused on questions of ‘authenticity’, Winkler takes a different approach when arguing that La Provençale is an extremely dense text shaped by a variety of popular cultural and literary traditions. Actual images in travelogues may be read as paratext, i.e. what Gérard Genette has called an ‘accompaniment’ (Genette 1991: 261) to a literary work, but also the ‘zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public’ (Genette 1997: 2). Sandra Vlasta offers a compa- rative analysis of Georg Forster’s Reise um die Welt (German 1778–80; A Voyage Round the World, 1777) and Karl Philipp Moritz’s Reisen eines Deutschen in England im Jahr 1782 (1783; Journeys of a German in England, 1795) to show that, despite their similar publication dates and readership, paratexts in the form of images in these two accounts have different functions. Whereas Forster uses detailed drawings of everyday objects, musical instruments, and weapons to underscore the fact that he is writing about a scientific expedition, the first edition of Moritz’s account depicts the entrance to the Peak District’s Peak Cavern — an unexpected illustration of a journey to England, which most contemporaries would have associated mainly with London.