| Summary: | Until the middle of the 19th century, the travelogues about the East maintained a latent rivalry with the new optical show of the Panorama. The travel writers of the Romantic period, undertaking an anxious but fruitful dialogue with the pictorial techniques of the Panorama, seem to have progressively come to terms with the necessity of the travelling genre within this competition. If Chateaubriand admitted himself deceived by Pierre Prévost's Panorama of Jerusalem to the point of forgetting the difference between literary and pictorial media, his successors (we focus here on Lamartine and Nerval) implicitly reaffirmed with growing firmness the prerogatives of literature, which can reveal more of the world than the Panorama ever could.
|
|---|