Kenny Commentary

Kenny Commentary

Fall 2017

Frank Kenny

Throughout the course, we have discussed how novels were looked down upon by many English readers in the eighteenth/nineteenth century. For my experimental bibliography project, I gathered the bibliographic information for "Travels for the Heart," a novel of low renown that has very little information available aside from the raw bibliographic data found on the Eighteenth century novels database.

This novel is a quintessential travel novel that captures the English tendency of romanticizing continental Europe. Through the preface, the novel seeks to establish some diplomatic message by framing the opening message as a personal account from an English emissary in France. However, if one reads through the description, the novel actually consists of common Englishmen exploring the North of France, marveling at Gothic cathedrals in Brittany and Calais, and also having strange escapades with the local French population. With my traditional bibliography, I parsed out the preface into four parts, using photography from campus of Gothic/Romanesque architecture that characterizes cathedrals in Northern France, which is the centerpiece of setting in this novel. With that, I also sought to make it like an advertisement of sorts to highlight the reproducibility and widespread 'averageness' of this novel which would appeal to a British person enamored with the attractions of continental Europe.

My experimental bibliography seeks to capture the romanticization of Continental Europe present in the English travel novel. A traditional bibliography focuses on text and the novel as a published work, but my project tries to capture the content within by portraying the Gothic architecture of the setting through images, and incorporating that with prefatory text.