Carl Thompson. The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. ISBN: 0199259984. Price: US$99

Carl Thompson positions his book between recent studies of the sea and seafaring in eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, and work on performativity and the subject. Developing Mary Louise Pratt’s thesis about the self-proclaimed vulnerability of nineteenth century explorers, Thompson argues that modern distinctions between travel and tourism, and the association of discomfort and danger with morally privileged ‘travel’, is rooted in the Romantic canon. He shows how Wordsworth and Byron in particular strive self-consciously to present their own suffering as evidence of authentic experience unavailable to readers. While addressing the traditional association of Romantic journeying and pilgrimage narrative, he writes that ‘there are more immediate models than romance-hero and pilgrim on which the Romantic traveller bases his self-dramatization qua traveller, even if these models are in turn heavily invested with notions drawn from Romance and pilgrimage traditions.’ (27) The greater part of the book is devoted to tracing the details connections and precise influences of these ‘more immediate models.’ Thompson’s elaboration of Robin Jarvis and Celeste Langan’s explorations of Romantic pedestrianism is compelling. He suggests that a significant part of the importance of walking in Wordsworth’s work is related to the physical and mental hardship of mountain-climbing, and the close readings offered in this context, as throughout the book, are original and illuminating. However, the opportunity to develop and theorise the connections between walking and writing is not taken, and as Thompson’s book progresses the lack of theoretical exegesis becomes more marked. It is a particular problem in the third chapter, where work on Wordsworth’s self-representations sits in oddly paratactic relation to the narratives of actual and metaphorical characters in his poems. Here, as elsewhere, the strength and subtlety of the close readings makes a convincing case for new and fruitful contexts for these best-known poems, but the implicit and uneven quality of any theoretical context for these readings, and a tendency to depend on older critical material, means that the full potential of this book remains unrealised. Thompson’s partially articulated intellectual affiliations betray him early on, when he defines ‘Romanticism’ “as very much a masculine agenda, a set of creative, interpretative, and representational strategies taken up for the most part by male writers and readers.” (16). A footnote gives the authorities of Marlon Ross and Anne Mellor for this exclusion, publishing in 1989 and 1988 respectively. Important works indeed, but repeatedly challenged over the last twenty years by scholars to whose work there is scant reference here. The systematic exclusion of female writers from this study is distressing partly because there is so little need for it; since this is for the most part a study of influence it would be sufficient to take influence as the logic for inclusion, which would leave the shape of the book very much what it is at the moment without the need or incentive to dismiss women’s writing as “decidedly “amateur.”’ Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Norway, Sweden and Denmark would have provided an interesting and probably fruitful counter-narrative for a scholar so gifted in comparative close analysis, but with that exception the selection of primary texts could have been left to speak – in the masculine voice – for itself. Less easy to ignore is the lack of explicit engagement with any twentieth- or twenty-first-century work on influence and intertextuality, which would provide an obvious and straightforward context for this book. Carl Thompson writes gracefully. His introduction sets out “the extent to which the Romantic traveller is simply following a different sort of script from the so-called tourist, rather than no script at all” (23). He describes how the guarantee of …