Preparing the Course: The Death of the Grand Tour and the Making of a Literary Traveller

Abstract

Across Europe historic communities are re-emerging, fighting for devolution, autonomy and the right to be recognised as politically independent. Yet at the same time, a powerful sense of a shared European identity has prevailed: in 1991 ‘Ode to Joy’ was played at Slovenia’s proclamation of independence and the EU flag was waved by anti-Soviet demonstrators in St Petersburg. One is quick to associate these events with rapid political changes over the last decade. Yet the revolutions of 1989/90 which overthrew communism in Eastern Europe — knocking down the Berlin Wall and, in December 1991, dismantling the USSR — complicated a much longer historical process whereby a ‘European’ identity was being conceptualised, debated and redefined within many different nations. The lifting of the Iron Curtain and the fission of Eastern states redrew political frontiers, redefined cultural boundaries and ended the Cold War dichotomy between West and East which had helped define ‘Western’ identity since the Second World War. Today, it is more difficult for the British to sustain a separate identity, without a politically and ideologically different nation on the other side of the Continent.