Abstract
Drawing on texts from Victorian periodicals and recent scholarly criticism from the field of cultural studies, Liedke breaks down the concept of seeing, its relation to the travellers’ perception and spatial practice of idling and its role for the re-subjectification of the world. Against the background of the dichotomy of “travellers” versus “tourists” emerging in the Victorian period and the growing influence of the railway, this chapter argues that one can use their respective sensibilities of seeing as a distinguishing criterion between tourist and traveller and develops the idea of idle traveling as a way of seeing, in contrast to tourism as a symbolical form of blindness. Liedke then illustrates how these changes in perception mechanisms brought about an “inward-turn” in the realm of travel and links this to virtual travel as a popular leisure activity in the mid-nineteenth century, exemplified by Dickens’s and Banvard’s panoramic (River) travels.
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Liedke, H. (2018). Sensibilities of Seeing. In: The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850–1901. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95861-3_3
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