This article examines the relationship between European romanticism and the geographical space of the Antipodes with the aim of showing that conventional readings of romanticism are limited by their restrictive focus on Europe as the sole arena for romantic expression, influence and imaginative inspiration.
The literary focus of this article is on the popular European genre of the imaginary voyage, which utilised the Antipodes as its primary setting in the eighteenth century. I argue that this genre is especially relevant to a broader global understanding of romanticism and that the traditional canonical parameters of romanticism can be productively extended to include this unique literary form. From the late seventeenth century, through the romantic period, and to end of the nineteenth century, books about imaginary voyages attracted a large readership in Europe. They were especially popular with eighteenth century readers in Britain and France. Drawing upon the numerous first hand reports of travellers and colonists, European writers used this fictional genre to present the world of the Antipodes in highly realistic terms at the same time as expressing popular European fantasies of the Antipodes, including fantasies of colonisation. Imaginary voyages offered readers a means of travelling in their minds from familiar European territory to far away spaces of the imagined and desired. Throughout the discussion, I refer to one of the most popular examples of an eighteenth century imaginary voyage, Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751). This text was admired by the English romantic themselves and has been described by critics as an early but neglected expression of the romantic imagination in prose writing.
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Arthur, Paul Longley. “Imaginary Voyages and the Romantic Imagination,” in “Fresh Cuts,” ed. Elizabeth Ruinard and Elspeth Tilley, special issue, Journal of Australian Studies 67 (2001): 186–95.
