| Abstrakt: |
This article explores nineteenth‐century British travel writings about Iceland and the importance of literary representation as a socially constitutive force. In the accounts of Richard Burton and William Morris, Iceland emerges as the representations of a vast colonial power, seeking to embrace the island in its Romantic conceptualization of the remote North, so integral to the imagining of British national identity. Given the roots of ethnographic writing in such accounts, examination of the nineteenth‐century traveller as cultural interpreter and theorist reflects back on contemporary concerns regarding the inscription of other societies as a poetics of displacement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] |
