George G. Dekker. The Fictions of Romantic Tourism: Radcliffe, Scott, and Mary Shelley. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0804750084. Price: $55.00.

Detailed close readings of individual texts are the central contribution of Dekker’s study, and, over the course of this work, he develops two essential points about the relationship between the Romantic novel and the travel writing that was contemporaneous with its development. Both points are laid out clearly in the introductory chapter and are developed carefully as the argument progresses. Dekker first claim is that Romantic novels shared with late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travel writing an investment in fiction. Here, the primary historical contrast is between these works and their immediate eighteenth-century predecessors, which, Dekker argues, privileged narrative realism. Why this shift in sensibilities, however? Why should the Romantic novel turn overtly toward fiction? While disavowing a “direct causal relationship,” Dekker contends that “key features of Romantic tourism—its devices for enhancing nature, its playfulness, its proneness to create and suspect fictions, and above all its privileging of the imagination—can be viewed as extensions of the fiction-making…processes” (25-6). The suggestion is that the novelists featured in this study—Ann Radcliffe, Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley—each drew upon their intimate knowledge of travel writing and its conventions in shaping the characteristic novels of their period. Dekker’s second claim is that the Georgian era coincided historically with a unique moment in the history of travel writing, during which middle-class tourism first emerged as a feature of the cultural landscape. This resulted in what Dekker designates the “Romantic ‘Age’ of Tourism,” a period dating from circa 1745-1830 during which middle-class aesthetics of the new and the novel (in both senses of that term) characterized tourism; throughout the study, he distinguishes Romantic tourism both from the earlier aristocratic model of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour and from the subsequent bourgeois familiarity of the Victorian traveler, with important implications for the novel as a genre. In the introduction and especially in chapters one and two, Dekker defines the term “Romantic” as it operates in this study. The term is, he acknowledges, primarily a matter of convention—these are the novels we “usually agree to call Romantic” (3). However, Dekker also implies at moments in the text that the term “Romantic” encompasses a common set of aesthetic objectives, chief of which is the privileging of “patent fictionality” (3). (Jane Austen, for example, is cast as clearly “un-Romantic,” presumably on account of her entrenched narrative realism.) Although the correlation of the Romantic with the fictional is somewhat unsatisfying in the introduction, Dekker presents the argument quite convincingly in the second chapter, entitled (aptly enough) “The Fictionality of the Romantic Novel.” Here, Dekker argues for the connection by reading the "self-consciously experimental" (54) origins of the Romantic novel as a “mixed form” (56) in the works of Rousseau, Walpole, and Reeve. Chapter one, “The Fictions of Romantic Tourism,” makes a parallel case for the Romantic travel narrative, as represented by the texts of Walpole, Gray, Johnson, Wollstonecraft, and a number of American writers who traveled to Europe during this period While incisive textual readings characterize Dekker’s argumentative approach to his topic, the most compelling features of this study is the way in which he returns in each case study to illuminate a common set of themes, chapter after chapter. Perhaps most importantly, he provides a provocative analysis of the connections between tourism and the rhetoric of childhood in the period—a rhetoric that he demonstrates is central both to the idea of the Romantic and to the fictions it privileged. Indeed, toward the end of his study, he distinguishes the Romantic novel from the Victorian novel, in part, by suggesting briefly that the cultural “exhaustion” (250) and commercialization of the Romantic-period travel …