Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
9-2025
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Comparative Literature
Advisor
Bettina Lerner
Committee Members
Amr Kamal
Caroline Reitz
Subject Categories
Comparative Literature | French and Francophone Literature | Literature in English, British Isles | Literature in English, North America
Keywords
travel literature, realism, popular fiction, imperialism, periphery, unheimlich
Abstract
This dissertation examines two literary forms that remain today on the periphery of nineteenth-century Realism and its novelistic paradigm: travel writing, and its fictional counterpart, the travel tropes that proliferate in fin-de-siècle popular fiction. The role of travel in imperial France and Britain is modulated by genre: in travel non-fiction, ambivalence often translates into the performance of a vision rather than an observation of the views, reflecting more about the traveller’s relationship to collective identity at home than truly rendering an account of the foreign. In popular fiction, and especially texts that feature tropes of counter-invasion, a similar effect of estrangement is achieved, only to reveal a sense of the unheimlich within the imperial nation, rather than triggered by the foreign monsters pictured as coming from faraway colonies. I argue that this effect of estrangement, far from fulfilling an escapist function, produces ‘peripheral’ realisms in both genres, on the margins of the Realist novel, of narration, and of centralised, imperial culture. In its comparison of modes of ‘writing travel’ across genres, this dissertation encourages a broadening of the definition of ‘travel writing’ to include fictional treatments of travel and expand our understanding of its affordances as a cultural practice.
Recommended Citation
Hakem-Lemaire, Manon, "Peripheral Realisms: Travelled Visions of the French and British Fin de siècle" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6438
Included in
Comparative Literature Commons, French and Francophone Literature Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons
