| Sumario: | In this paper I compare four travel reports that resulted from the Prussian expedition of Egypt undertaken between 1820 and 1821 under Heinrich von Minutoli, but the main focus of my analysis is concerned with Minutoli’s travel account as well as the one by his wife, Wolfradine von Minutoli. These illustrate not only the division of the genre into the “scientific” and the “subjective” travel account but also the divergent strategies for constructing knowledge, which lead to highly gendered sets of knowledge. For Heinrich von Minutoli, the production of data has central importance and his preference for abstracted visualization is one strategy of “scientization” used in order to ensure clarity and verifiability. But his travel account is also characterized by constant fissures between his efforts to achieve objectivity and the various manifestations of non-knowledge, as well as by the tensions between solely illustrative visualization and independent imagery. Whereas his text primarily documents knowledge generation and the evolution of archaeology, Wolfradine von Minutoli works to enliven these knowledge sets within the dimension of individual experience; hence she not only refers to aesthetic notions of Romanticism and to the Romantic pattern of perception but she also develops a female version of the sublime.
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