Adriatic Stereoscopies

einrich Noé and the Literary Construction of Dalmatia

Abstract

The essay examines Dalmatien und seine Inselwelt (1870) by Heinrich Noé, considering it a paradigmatic example of late-nineteenth-century travel writing, in which aesthetic representation, imperial ideology, and the construction of otherness are tightly interwoven. The metaphor of the Stereoskop shapes the structure of the work: a sequence of isolated visual tableaux in which Dalmatia is not described to be understood, but rather to be observed and classified. Landscape and human figures take on the form of ornamental images, and the experience of travel turns into an exercise in controlled vision. The rhetorical strategies employed – fragmentation, the exclusion of the other’s voice, and the reduction of local culture to visual folklore – respond to the expectations of a bourgeois Central European readership that, through the act of narration, seeks confirmation of its own symbolic centrality. The analysis highlights how Noé’s writing contributes to the construction of an “internal Orient”, projecting cultural difference into a closed textual space that serves the affirmation of perceptual hegemony. Comparison with authors such as Johann Georg Kohl and Karl Emil Franzos underscores the distinctive character of Noé’s vision, situated at the intersection of visual art, Orientalism, and the rhetoric of the exotic. The Dalmatia that emerges is not a territory to be explored but a repertoire of images already arranged for the gaze, turning representation itself into an act of symbolic appropriation.