Page - 22 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

22 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Sandra Vlasta | Enlightening report versus enlightened traveller I Introduction1 From the second half of the eighteenth century onwards, the travelogue was a popular genre (see Korte 2016: 173; Martin 2008a). This was true of both factual and fictitious accounts, both originals and translations (see Scheitler 1999; Willenberg 2012). There are a number of reasons for this popularity, one of which is surely the thirst for knowledge that, during the Enlighten- ment, had reached different sections of the population (see Jäger 1989). The growing demand for travelogues was accompanied by a transformation of the genre, which was increasingly targeted at a broader audience rather than specialists and thus became more literary and aesthetically ambitious (Moritz 2015: 282). Furthermore, rather than writing objective accounts, the authors increasingly underscored their subjective views of the journey — an aspect that led to greater focus on the travelling (and narrating) subject rather than the places described (see Meier 1989). This emphasis on points of view went hand in hand with the increased significance of the visual; accordingly, the titles of travelogues published from the late eighteenth century onwards, such as Sketches of Spain (Beckford 1834), Ansichten einer Ent- deckungsreise (Chamisso 1821) and Impressions de voyage (Dumas 1834), reveal that travelogues were not perceived solely as texts and that their visual aspects were of great importance. These aspects included pictures, sketches, views, and maps, actually depicted or simply described in words. In what follows, I attempt to show that visual elements in travelogues from the late eigh- teenth century not only took different forms but also served different purposes. I will do so by providing a comparative analysis of the visual elements of Georg Forster’s Reise um die Welt (1778–80) and Karl Philipp Moritz’s Reisen eines Deutschen in England im Jahr 1782 (1783). These two texts lend themselves to comparison as they were published around the same time in Germany and thus targeted the same readership and reader expectations (we know that Forster even wrote a review of Moritz’s travelogue for the Göttingische Anzeigen; see Moritz 2015: 349). As I will show, both authors inscribed themselves in the travelogue genre while innovating it at the same time. In Moritz’s case, this is connected to an innovative use of images; in Forster’s, it is mainly due to his original style, which combined scientific standards with a humanist per- spective on the world. My analysis focuses on the relation between the texts and the images used within them, as well as the latter’s role in the production and reception of the travelogues. I argue that these para- or peritexts (Genette 1991; 1997) were by no means negligible additions but rather central to the books in question. Gérard Genette’s definition of paratext comprises images; he sees them as an ‘accompaniment’ (Genette 1991: 261) to a literary work, along with the author’s name, the title, and the preface.2 Genette has called paratexts ‘a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a stra- tegy, of an influence on the public, an influence that […] is at the service of a better reception 1 Research for this publication was funded by the European Union as part of the Marie-Sklodowska-Curie-Actions programme (Project: European Travel Writing in Context. The Socio-Political Dimension of Travelogues 1760– 1850 (EUTWIC, https://travelwriting.uni-mainz.de), Individual Fellowship, Grant Agreement No. 751378). I would like to thank the Zentrum für Interkulturelle Studien (ZIS) at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz for funding the copyediting of this publication. 2 Genette distinguishes between the peritext, which literally surrounds the literary text (e.g. titles, preface, foot- notes, etc.), and the epitext, which includes interviews, reviews, letters, etc. The peritext and the epitext together make up the paratext (Genette 1997).