Are We There Yet?
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Are We There Yet?: Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism connects the Victorian fascination with ""virtual travel"" with the rise of realism in 19th-century fiction and 21st-century experiments in virtual reality. Even as the expansion of river and railway networks in the 19th century made travel easier than ever before, staying at home and fantasising about travel turned into a favourite pastime. New ways of representing place—360-degree panoramas, foldout river maps, exhaustive railway guides—offered themselves as substitutes for actual travel. Thinking of these representations as a form of ""virtual travel"" reveals a surprising continuity between the Victorian fascination with imaginative dislocation and 21st-century efforts to use digital technology to expand the physical boundaries of the self.
Alison Byerly is Professor of English & American Literatures, Provost and Executive Vice President of Middlebury College.