The Grand Tour. Language,National Identity and Masculinity

The Grand Tour usually refers to the travel of Englishmen to Italy, where they acquired the taste essential to the gentleman and the paintings and other objects of virtù to display in their country estates. In this paper, I consider not Englishmen abroad but the meaning of the Grand Tour as a cultural and educational practice for elite males in eighteenth-century England. My argument is that as an educational practice, the Grand Tour was highly contradictory, and that it was especially paradoxical in relation to one of its aims, language learning. Using Bakhtin's concepts of heteroglossia and dialogism as analytical framework, I explore the shifting power relations between the English and French languages throughout the century, and argue that the Grand Tour played a key role in the elaboration of discourses on language and national identity in the late eighteenth century.