Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts.(Book review)

Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts, by Leila Koivunen; pp. xvi + 351. London and New York: Routledge, 2008, 70.00 [pounds sterling], $103.00.

Leila Koivunen's study makes an impressive contribution to the growing body of critical work on Victorian travel writing. In eight meticulously researched chapters, Koivunen traces the production of illustrations for Victorian travel and exploration narratives focused on Africa, from the initial sketches created by travelers while still in the field to the complex series of revisions both in Africa and Britain that transformed these sketches into their final published versions. In fact, Koivunen's single most important critical contribution lies in her ability to demonstrate that, despite claims of authenticity, "travel-book illustrations ... were neither exact documents of what travellers had witnessed nor of what they had recorded by visual means," but rather "were the result of a long construction process, which, in many respects, resembled the editing of texts for publication, but included an even greater variety of different stages and persons" (206).

In making this argument, Koivunen engages several strands of critical thought. First, she enters a long-running discussion …