The importance of literary travel writing can be partly explained by the qualities it shares with imaginative literature featuring the concepts of Romanticism. Writers from Twain and Steinbeck to Thoreau and Wordsworth have depicted the human bent towards adventure and the unknown and, especially in rapidly developing societies, the urge to return to simplicity and the core values of life and t...

Introduction Both Edmund Burke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau can be grouped among the key thinkers of the eighteenth century. They are widely understood to be quite different from one another, and their outlooks—especially their political-philosophical views—are often contrasted by scholars. Among those who have profitably contrasted Burke with Rousseau is the early twentieth century literary schol...