The Imprisoned Traveler

Joseph Forsyth and Napoleon's Italy

Keith Crook

2019
230 pages
$34.95
ISBN 9781684481620
Transits

The Imprisoned Traveler is a fascinating portrait of a unique book, its context, and its elusive author. Joseph Forsyth, traveling through an Italy plundered by Napoleon, was unjustly imprisoned in 1803 by the French as an enemy alien. Out of his arduous eleven-year "detention" came his only book, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy (1813). Written as an (unsuccessful) appeal for release, praised by Forsyth's contemporaries for its originality and fine taste, it is now recognized as a classic of Romantic period travel writing. Keith Crook, in this authoritative study, evokes the peculiar miseries that Forsyth endured in French prisons, reveals the significance of Forsyth's encounters with scientists, poets, scholars, and ordinary Italians, and analyzes his judgments on Italian artworks. He uncovers how Forsyth's allusiveness functions as a method of covert protest against Napoleon and reproduces the hitherto unpublished correspondence between the imprisoned Forsyth and his brother.

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Reviews

"Crook has assumed the privileged role of updating the twenty-first-century scholarly appreciation of Forsyth's seminal account of Napoleonic Italy, and Crook's book is a must on any shelf of specialized Romantic travel writing on Italy."
- The BARS Review, Winter 2021

"...in alerting us to Forsyth's individual voice, Crook emphasizes the complexities in his works - its silences, its indirections and innuendos, its ironic undertones, and its moments of opacity and vagueness - showing how integral they are to the making of this landmark in the discourse of Italia romantica."
- Romantic Circles, October 2020

"The Imprisoned Traveler, which includes a series of letters he [Forsyth] was able to send from captivity to his brother in Scotland, offers an expertly detailed tribute to the man and his work in the wider aesthetic and political contexts of Romantic Europe."
- Times Literary Supplement, November 2020

About the author:

Keith Crook taught for many years at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, where he is now an Honorary Fellow, specializing in eighteenth-century literature. His main publications are on Samuel Johnson and Swift. He published the standard scholarly edition of Joseph Forsyth's Italy in 2001.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $120.00, 978-1-6844-8163-7; EPUB: $34.95, 978-1-6844-8164-4