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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Between Two Shores. Travellers as Cultural Mediators (The journey to Spain in the eighteenth century)

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This paper, drawing on travel narratives of a journey to Spain in the eighteenth century, seeks to explore the role of travellers as cultural interpreters, by examining how they presented themselves as providers of new knowledge about 'distant' or 'exotic' countries (even within Europe); how their images of the territories they visited were the product of a negotiation between their literary and philosophical background, and actual experience, and how those visions were appropriated by eighteenth-century philosophers to build their own theories about human nature, the workings and 'progress' of societies, and the rules governing 'national characters'; more specifically, how they contributed to redefine European identity and its internal hierarchies.