«Voyageons avec lui»: la métaphore viatique dans la critique périodique française des relations de voyage (1775–1815)

Abstract

This article examines the use of travel metaphors in French periodical reviews of non-fiction travelogues at the turn of the eighteenth and the nineteenth century. The French periodical press took an increasing interest in travel literature in this period, forming an important instance of mediation between travel writers and the reading public. In travel-book reviews, journalists would frequently make use of a rhetoric aimed at presenting the periodical text as a double co-experience: an imaginary travel in the wake of the travel writer and a ‘travel’ through the journalist’s own reading experience. The article shows how this metaphor appears as a diverse rhetorical device that served different functions within the periodical text. Clearly aimed at engaging the reader in the text, the metaphor can also be read as conveying a meta-discourse that highlights the reviewers’ appropriation and remediation of the travelogue. The article analyses occurrences of the travel metaphor in reviews taken from a varied set of periodicals – journals, advertisers, and newspapers – in order to shed light on how the French periodical press operated in retransmitting literary travel experiences in a golden age of non-fiction travel writing.