University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
Doi
Abstract
Relying on a range of nineteenth-century genres and authorial voices, “Guiding the ‘Intelligent English Traveller’” spotlights John Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers as collaborative, interactive, and multidisciplinary texts. Guidebooks from the Victorian age emerged from epistolary and travelogue genres, cited Romantic poets, depended on contributions from the great minds of the day, and informed contemporary fictional representations of travel. The Handbooks for Travellers were the exemplar of the serial guide. Their multimedia and -modal form, diverse author- and editorship, and commercial brand make them a possibly unique example of material history and publishing practice, as illustrated in my opening chapter, which relies on evidence gathered at the John Murray Archive in the National Library of Scotland. Subsequent chapters tracing “Murrays” in the travel writing and fiction of George Eliot and Henry James underscore the Handbooks’ rhetorical influence and cultural reach. The coda to this project is more experimental, describing the development of an interactive digital map representing Murray’s Handbook series for Europe. This map illustrates the temporal and geographic changes in the Murray series using the first three Handbooks as examples. My application of computational methods for interpreting the Handbooks emphasizes that these texts were tools that anticipate the iterative, interdisciplinary, intertextual, and multivocal processes at the heart of digital humanities work.Doctor of Philosoph
