Cirrus@Austlit

'Writing of Trollope’s 1859 travelogue The West Indies and the Spanish Main , Claudia Brandenstein has, in an argument influenced by the work of Mary Louise Pratt, described his approach to the landscape as a type of taking possession. For Brandenstein, Trollope engages in the ‘production of the monarch-of-all-I survey scene’ (15), depicting landscapes that are ‘feminized’ and ‘easily subdued’ (19), stemming from a feeling of proprietorial entitlement, which is underpinned by a British imperialist sense of mastery over the West Indian colonial holdings. This approach to the colonial landscape is a common feature in both painting and travel writing of the nineteenth century. Simon Ryan, for instance, has put forward a similar argument with regard to contemporary accounts of the Australian scenery. According to Ryan, explorers and other chroniclers frequently depicted the Australian countryside as ‘well adapted’ for settlement, deploying a European aesthetic lens of the picturesque as a means of taming its more confronting elements and uncanny vistas (74).'

Source: Abstract.