Abstract: This dissertation contributes to the project of re-mapping British national literature inspired by postcolonial theory. I argue that the representations of Britain as an imperial center draw on internal divisions between Western Europe and the southern and eastern peripheries of the continent. As European borders solidified in the long nineteenth century (1789-1914), I analyze the generic intersections of fictional and non-fictional travel narratives to examine how nineteenth-century British writers conceived the imagined boundaries between Britain and the Continent. While the fictional and non-fictional accounts of Europe share representative strategies such as the Picturesque or Orientalism, fictional settings adapt particular features of continental locations to accommodate plots of British national consolidation. In order to illustrate the ideological functions of fictional travel narratives, I distinguish between two kinds of settings. Writers such as Ann Radcliffe and Bram Stoker, whose Gothic settings are based on existing travel narratives, displace British ideological struggles onto European peripheries to contain foreign threats. These Gothic, or synthetic, settings blur the boundaries between home and abroad, reminding readers of the sometimes terrifying fact that Britain is a part of Europe. On the other hand, writers such as Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Dickens, who draw on their own travel experience and travel writing in constructing their satirical or realist settings, attack British complacency in periods of relative stability and prosperity. Although synthetic settings are conventionally considered to be instances of othering, it is the mimetic settings that absorb the travel writers opposition of home and abroad and thus highlight the isolation of Britain from the Continent. My research on the literariness of travel writing and its construction of European peripheries brings a new perspective to the study of genre and nationalism in the field of nineteenth-century British literature. As I demonstrate how cross-cultural contact may sharpen rather than bridge the boundaries among Europeans, my dissertation also helps explain the persistence of imaginative geographies in our age of global communication and travel.