Orientalist Exploits: Post-Romantic Travel Writing in France, 1830s–1860s

By the middle of the nineteenth century in France, first-hand travel accounts featuring journeys to North Africa and the Middle East – the “voyage en Orient” – were regarded by many ambitious young authors as an outmoded form. But these travelogues remained wildly popular, and they offered a tempting opportunity to win readers and fame. Orientalist Exploits: Post-Romantic Travel Writing in France, 1830s–1860s examines four writers who treated the Romantic Oriental travelogue as source material for literary experimentation: Honoré de Balzac, Maxime Du Camp, Charles Baudelaire, and Gustave Flaubert. With a self-aware nod to the audience, they modified, parodied, and critiqued the subgenre, devising innovative approaches to representing the experience of travel to familiarly exotic places that French readers associated with the Orient. Drawing on studies of correspondence, unpublished travel notes, photographs, and published best-sellers, Michelle Lee demonstrates that some of France’s most prominent authors of the nineteenth century made their names by creatively exploiting and modernizing the tropes of Romantic Orientalist travel writing in ways that produced distinctive aspects of their styles. Their engagement with this subgenre, as Orientalist Exploits shows, not only amplified an existing cultural imaginary of the so-called Orient but also fostered new techniques and modes of representation, which sparked developments in literary realism and modernism in mid-nineteenth-century France.