Michael McKeon - Seven Types of Virtual Travel

Professor McKeon is the author of The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), which won a Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award given by the Association of American Publishers. He is also the author of the groundbreaking The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (John Hopkins University Press, 1987, 2002), which won the MLA James Russell Lowell Prize for the best book of the year, as well as Politics and Poetry in Restoration England (Harvard University Press, 1975). He edited the anthology Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). In addition, he has published numerous articles on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature and culture and on literary theory and methodology.

Professor McKeon's topic for this lecture concerns the well-known intersection between the flourishing of the travel narrative genre and the emergence of the novel genre, but from a relatively unfamiliar perspective. From their earliest existence, narratives of actual travels have sustained an analogy with the idea of metaphorical and virtual travel. In the modern period, the sheer multiplication of voyages to the New World and the powerful model of empirical epistemology encouraged writers to pursue the relation between actual and virtual travel in a variety of directions that dovetail with novelistic experiments in representation.

The Ian Watt lecture on the History and Theory of the Novel presents an annual opportunity to discuss core intellectual issues surrounding the novel and its study, commemorating the renowned Stanford professor whose work has profoundly influenced literary study for nearly 50 years. This lecture presents an annual opportunity to discuss core intellectual issues surrounding the novel and literary studies.