Anti-heroism and Intercultural Hints in David Charles Badham's Travel in Sicily

Abstract

The paper analyses the discursive features of Charles Badham's travelogues in Sicily in the context of the XIX century Travel Writing development. The travelogues are peculiar in their textual hybridity, blending some of the traditional discursive paradigms of the late Grand Tour travelogues and some of the conventional categories of the exploration and scientific accounts on the imperial frontier proper of the second half of the XIX century. In Badham's travelogues the informational components and a clear subjectiveness of his experience co-exist; far from articulating heroic attitudes, Badham's travelgues deploy an intercultural approach rather than, in Pratt's words (1985), a "monarch-of-all-I-survey attitude. Sicily is represented as a world discovered rather than invented and, although some of the descriptive stereotypes of the imperial travelogue may be found, they do not constitute the discoursive framework of the account.