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Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Sandra Vlasta | Enlightening report versus enlightened traveller 23 for the text and a more pertinent reading of it’ (Genette 1997: 2). In accordance with Philippe Lejeune, Genette refers to the paratext as the fringe or edge of the literary text, or, with refe- rence to Jorge Luis Borges, a threshold. For the purposes of the following analysis of images in Forster’s and Moritz’s travelogues, the important aspect of Genette’s concept of paratext is the fact that a paratext influences the reader’s reception of a text. This, I argue, is something of which Forster and Moritz, as well as other protagonists involved in the publication of these travelogues, were well aware. Accordingly, like many writers of travelogues at the time (see Kel- ler and Siebers 2017: 54), they used images to bring home the particular messages of their texts. In this article, I accordingly argue that the images in these travelogues must be read as specific paratexts that are central to the texts. Forster’s sketches of everyday objects, clothes, attire, weapons, and plants underscore the extent to which his journey was primarily an expedition undertaken in the encyclopaedic spirit of the Enlightenment (see Walchester 2019; Vorpahl 2020: 121). At the same time — or rather, accordingly — the illustrations have an exotifying effect and satisfy the reader’s interest in the ‘other’, i.e. the people, places, plants, and objects that the crew of the Resolution encountered on their journey. The reader thus learns something from Forster’s text; it has enlightening qualities. The images serve to illustrate, and, as will be shown, they are tightly interwoven with the text. On the cover of the first edition of Moritz’s text, there is a copper engraving of the entrance to the Peak Cavern in the Peak District. Moritz’s visit to the cave is one of the highlights of his journey and is literally the highest, i.e. most northerly, point that he reached before returning to London. The dark entrance to the cave is in stark contrast to what the contemporary reader would normally associate with England. At the time, the country was mainly associated with London rather than the mountains and caves of the North. In fact, other German travelogues on England concentrated on the capital (see Maurer 1992). The visual introduction to Moritz’s text provided by the engraving distinguishes his travelogue from others; it signals to the reader that, like the picture, his text will differ from earlier depictions of England. Indeed, Moritz’s travelogue positions itself in a new tradition of travel writing, in which the experience of the travelling subject, including his sensual and sentimental perceptions, comes to the fore. Thus, the individual aspect of the enlightening project of travelling is emphasized, and the reader is presented with an enlightened traveller. In their prefaces, both Moritz and Forster emphasize that they are providing their own subjective accounts of their journeys (Forster’s famous ‘colour of the glass through which I looked’; Forster 1777: xiii). In Moritz’s case, this impression is further highlighted by the travelogue’s unconventional cover. Forster’s travelogue, on the other hand, largely corresponds to the conventions of the genre at the time, reflected in the illustra- tions he uses. In what follows, I first present Georg Forster’s travelogue Reise um die Welt and provide an overview of its turbulent genesis, in which images play a major role. Against this historical background, I analyse the images that Forster used in his travelogue and the relation between them and the text. The following section is dedicated to Karl Philipp Moritz’s Reisen eines Deutschen in England. In my analysis of this text, I highlight the very different use of images in Moritz’s account, which underscores his focus on the enlightened traveller. The different forms and functions of the images and their relation to the text in these two travelogues — published at around the same time and for a similar readership — speak to the heterogeneity