Phantom Islands: In Search of Mythical Lands

Abstract

and the broader cultural and economic trends of his time. It would also allow Scott’s published journal to throw light back upon those trends in new and interesting ways. Schneider is an able biographer, but the diary still awaits the gaze of a historian pursuing a bigger analytical monograph. Luckily, now that it has been published, that happy occasion has been rendered more likely. Thoughmany dozens of manuscript travel journals from the 1820s like Scott’s lie slumbering in American archives, very few of them have been favoured with a modern critical edition. Schneider’s thorough effort to reprint this particular travel journal thus stands out, and I anticipate that the access it grants students of history to the lived experience of the American travel in the 1820s will produce a new and lively generation of analysis of that important phenomenon.