Travel in gold and silver: from the alchemy of the word to the metamorphosis of the soul

Abstract

Myths and facts build an imaginary geography of Andalusia. The geographer’s point of view is mingled with the writer’s approach, and travel narratives are based on an epistemological alchemy. Located on the margins of Europe, Andalusia, with its golden and silver rivers, has been thought of as a locus amoenus for a long time. Using the myth of the Golden Age (which Fénelon locates in Baetica) and cultivating nostalgia for the glorious Al-Andalus, the romantic journey paints the idealized portrait of the writer as a magician and alchemist. Exceeding the generic and formal limits, mixing history and fiction, combining poetry and prose, appropriating the aesthetic tendencies of this period (return to the Middle Ages, literary and pictorial Orientalism), romantic travel writers are looking for a new formula of the travel narrative, the model of which they discover in the exuberance of the Andalusian nature.