Pleasure and Instruction: Generic Conventions in Emma Hart Willard’s Journal and Letters, from France and Great Britain

Abstract

The purpose of the present paper is to analyse epistolary and descriptive conventions in Journal and Letters, from France and Great Britain (1833) by Emma Willard. The article argues that Willard attempts to combine the standards of 18th-century travelogue with its emphasis on instruction with a new type of autobiographical travel narrative which puts the persona of a traveller in the foreground. In this respect, Willard’s Journal and Travels, for all its didacticism, testifies to an increasing value attached to subjective experience, which was to become one of the distinguishing features of nineteenth-century travel writing.