Content area
Full text
Peter Fjågesund and Ruth A. Symes. The Northern Utopia: British Perceptions of Norway in the Nineteenth Century. Studia Imagologica 10. Amsterdam Studies on Cultural Identity 10. Amsterdam and New York: Rodolphi, 2003. Pp. 413 .
In recent years, increasing attention has been directed to the cultural history of travel and tourism. Its primary focus has been upon "perception": how travelers have reacted to other lands and societies in ways that reveal their own times and national origins. Peter Fjågesund and Ruth A. Symes, a Norwegian and a British literary historian, here devote themselves to Britain's particularly close relationship with Norway during the nineteenth century as mainly reflected in travel accounts-and not least in their romantic illustrations.
Before the later eighteenth century, few Europeans traveled, especially to the northern periphery, without practical reasons. After 1760 with the rising pre-romantic tide, there were those who traveled for the experience itself often seeking new and relatively unknown regions. Romanticism underwent a "broad shift from south to north" (132). Wild and primitive Norway now came to exercise a special fascination.
Following the Napoleonic wars travel to Norway gradually increased. Meanwhile, the rise of organized tourism created a contrast between the "solicatary traveler" in the romantic tradition, and the mere...