Mobile spaces

During the nineteenth century more of the world came to Europe than before, and a growing number of Europeans ventured to places other than their own, also beyond European borders. The general mobility of places and people quickened and did so because of new technologies that expanded transport, communication and trade. Realism explored how mobility had become a fundamental condition for human identity in contemporary culture. Explorers mapped the interior of the colonies and brought new knowledge, strange objects and foreign people back to Europe while at the same time making the globe more accessible. In the world’s fairs the wonders of the world were on display together with innovations that helped the urbanized and industrialized societies to obtain resources from distant places, thereby promoting global trade. The fairs also became the first manifestations of mass tourism for millions of people. On a smaller scale, excursions to one’s urban surroundings became popular and made mobility an everyday experience for ever more people. Realism views such mobility in a double perspective. On the one hand, it increased individual freedom to acquire new knowledge and settle in new places. On the other hand, it also created new social fusions and cultural antagonisms between the urban or imperial centers with their high mobility and centralized power and the increasingly marginalized ways of life outside these centers, both domestic and overseas. Using examples from travel accounts and fiction from nineteenth-century realism, the essay discusses this double perspective and its challenge to language and the literary imagination.