Women and the Politics of Travel, 1870-1914


Book Description

Other questions of both general and critical interest, such as vestimentary display in its guise as exhibitionary colonialist language are also raised."--Jacket.




Politics, Identity, and Mobility in Travel Writing


Book Description

This collection examines the intersections between the personal and the political in travel writing, and the dialectic between mobility and stasis, through an analysis of specific cases across geographical and historical boundaries. The authors explore the various ways in which travel texts represent actual political conditions and thus engage in discussions about national, transnational, and global citizenship; how they propose real-world political interventions in the places where the traveler goes; what tone they take toward political or socio-political violence; and how they intersect with political debates. Travel writing can be viewed as political in a purely instrumental sense, but, as this volume also demonstrates, travel writing’s reception and ideological interventions also transform personal and cultural realities. This book thus examines the ways in which politics’ material effects inform and intersect with personal experience in travel texts and engage with travel’s dialectic of mobility and stasis. In spite of globalization and efforts to eradicate the colonial vision in travel writing and in travel writing criticism, this vision persists in various and complex ways. While the travelogue can be a space of discursive and direct oppression, these essays suggest that the travelogue is also a narrative space in which the traveler employs the genre to assert authority over his or her experiences of mobility. This book will be an important contribution for interdisciplinary scholars with interests in travel writing studies, global and transnational studies, women’s studies, multicultural studies, the social sciences, and history.




Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture


Book Description

Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture challenges a model of literary production that persists in literary studies: the so-called Geniekult or the idea of the solitary male author as genius that emerged around 1800 in German lands. A closer look at creative practices during this time indicates that collaborative creative endeavors, specifically joint ventures between women and men, were an important mode of literary production during this era. This volume surveys a variety of such collaborations and proves that male and female spheres of creation were not as distinct as has been previously thought. It demonstrates that the model of the male genius that dominated literary studies for centuries was not inevitable, that viable alternatives to it existed. Finally, it demands that we rethink definitions of an author and a literary work in ways that account for the complex modes of creation from which they arose.




Handbook of British Travel Writing


Book Description

This handbook offers a systematic exploration of current key topics in travel writing studies. It addresses the history, impact, and unique discursive variety of British travel writing by covering some of the most celebrated and canonical authors of the genre as well as lesser known ones in more than thirty close-reading chapters. Combining theoretically informed, astute literary criticism of single texts with the analysis of the circumstances of their production and reception, these chapters offer excellent possibilities for understanding the complexity and cultural relevance of British travel writing.




Hunting Africa


Book Description

This book recovers the multiplicity of meanings embedded in colonial hunting and the power it symbolized by examining both the incorporation and representation of British women hunters in the sport and how African people leveraged British hunters' dependence on their labor and knowledge to direct the impact and experience of hunting.




British Women's Travel to Greece, 1840-1914


Book Description

Beginning with the publication of the first Murray guidebook to Greece in 1840 and ending with Virginia Woolf's journey to Athens, this book offers a genealogy of British women's travel literature about Greece. Churnjeet Mahn recounts the women's first-hand experiences of the sites and sights of antiquity, analyzing travel accounts by archaeologists, ethnographers, journalists, and tourists to chart women's renderings of Modern Greece through a series of discursive lenses. Mahn's offers insights into the importance of the Murray and Baedeker guidebooks; how knowledge of Greece and Classical Studies were used to justify colonial rule of India at the same time that Agnes Smith Lewis and Jane Ellen Harrison used Greece as a symbol of women's emancipation; British women's production of the first anthropological accounts of Modern Greece; and fin-de-siècle women who asserted their right to see and claim antiquity at the same time that the safety of the independent lady traveler was being called into question by the media.




Three Traveling Women Writers


Book Description

This book presents an alternative framework for reading nineteenth century women’s travel narratives by challenging the traditional paradigms which often limit women’s space in print culture. For the first time, through a comparative lens, a Latin American woman’s travel narrative is analyzed concomitantly with the narratives of a North American and a European writer. Contrary to the common assumption that Latin American women were powerless victims of imperialism, elite women had access to the predominant philosophies of their time, traveled around the globe, and wrote about their experiences. This book examines how an Argentinian writer, together with an English and an American writer, manipulate their bourgeois identity to inhabit the male dominated sphere of print culture. By travelling and publishing travel narratives, the three traveling women writers search for empowerment to establish their authority as writers and shapers of knowledge in literature. Utilizing several concepts and criticisms, including Aristotle’s rhetoric, Foucault’s theories, travel writing criticism, postcolonial discourse, and feminist literary criticism; this volume attempts to challenge old-fashioned architypes and confinements of gender for traveling women writers in the nineteenth century.




Gender, Science, and Authority in Women’s Travel Writing


Book Description

Gender, Science, and Authority in Women’s Travel Writing: Literary Perspectives on the Discourse of Natural History analyzes the interrelations among authority, gender and the scientific discipline of natural history in the works of transatlantic women travelers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Michelle Medeiros sheds new light on our understanding of the literary perspectives of the discourse of natural history and how these viewpoints had a surprising impact in areas that went beyond scientific fields. This book advances the study of travel writing and gender in new directions by bringing together Latin American, European, and American women travelers who actively engaged in natural history discussions in their writings. By demonstrating how these women were only able to participate in intellectual enterprises by embarking on transatlantic voyages, this book discloses how the work produced by these travelers challenged and reshaped dominant discourses, bringing a new point of view to nineteenth and twentieth-centuries studies in Latin American history, literature, cultural studies, and history of science. Moreover, this book analyzes to what extent the approaches employed by female travel writers who wanted to engage in the production of knowledge has evolved in that time period, and to what degree such changes could be considered positive and more productive.




Women, Travel Writing, and Truth


Book Description

The issue of truth has been one of the most constant, complex, and contentious in the cultural history of travel writing. Whether the travel was undertaken in the name of exploration, pilgrimage, science, inspiration, self-discovery, or a combination of these elements, questions of veracity and authenticity inevitably arise. Women, Travel, and Truth is a collection of twelve essays that explore the manifold ways in which travel and truth interact in women's travel writing. Essays range in date from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the eighteenth century to Jamaica Kincaid in the twenty-first, across such regions as India, Italy, Norway, Siberia, Austria, the Orient, the Caribbean, China and Mexico. Topics explored include blurred distinctions of fiction and non-fiction; travel writing and politics; subjectivity; displacement, and exile. Students and academics with interests in literary studies, history, geography, history of art, and modern languages will find this book an important reference.




Asian Home: Situating Self in Western Women’s Select Travel Narratives


Book Description

How did the West’s countercultural notions widen their zeal and zest onto the Himalayas? How did Nepal turn out to be a safe haven for Western women who made their travels to different Asian countries? With no direct traces of colonialism, the opening of Nepal to foreigners after 1951 offered travelers a new destination for imbibing Eastern spiritual traditions. The post-War condition was fertile for several radical movements. Many people found solace in traveling to escape from the brutal after-effects of the Second World War. The socio-political and economic conditions of Europe and America post-World War II necessitated the need to travel to overcome the trauma of the war. For women, travel became the means of empowerment and at the same time a spiritual endeavour. The knowledge and understanding of theology and other spiritual knowledge led many travelers to be part of the ‘hippie trail’, in which Nepal is the final destination. This book offers a fresh outlook to women’s perceptions of a second home in a foreign land.




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