Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Women travel writers'

This thesis examines travel literature by Mexican women in relation to transcultural performativities, which refers to a feminist critique of how writers capture their normative performativity and their agency as they interact with different cultural contexts. My analysis considers texts from the end of the nineteenth century, taking into consideration the first Mexican women who published travel literature, through to contemporary writers from the early twenty-first century. The major focus of this thesis will be to show how Mexican women writers repeat political and poetic performativities in their literature, based on their trips to foreign places. This thesis is composed of four parts: a theoretical analysis of transcultural performativities and three close, comparative readings of travel writing and the context of their production. In the first chapter, I propose a conceptual model named transcultural performativities to analyse travel literature. This model takes into consideration the contributions of Judith Butler, Fernando Ortiz, Walter Mignolo, Julio Ortega, Eyda Merediz, Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Gloria Anzaldúa, Homi Bhabha and Édouard Glissant. This analytical model has a tripartite structure: occidental Atlanticism, post-occidental border thinking, and the Philosophy of Relation in worldliness (globalisation). The second chapter is a comparative analysis of the works of Laura Méndez de Cuenca and Elena Garro to exemplify the Atlanticist relations among Europe, the United States, Latin America and, in particular Mexico. The third chapter examines the works of Rosario Castellanos and María Luisa Puga to grasp the cultural negotiations of the intermediate social experience between Mexico and other foreign countries. The final chapter explores the works of Esther Seligson and Myriam Moscona to analyse the positionality of Mexican Jews in relation to World Literatures. Overall, this thesis suggests that we can understand the complexities of the fluidity and non-fixity of subjectivity in Mexican women’s travel writing by dwelling on the constantly changing nature of sex/gender, social classes, racialization, nationalism, and religiosity.

This study examines the evolution of British women travel writers’ engagement with the Risorgimento during a decisive period preceding Italian reunification, from the infamous letter-opening incident of 1844 to the eve of the Second Italian War of Independence (1859-1861). Despite being outwardly denied a political voice back home, British women were conspicuous in their engagement with the Italian question. Italy’s allegorical personification lent itself well to female-oriented interpretations of the Risorgimento, with many women seeing Italy’s political oppression under Austria as analogous to their own disenfranchised condition in Britain. The rise of mass tourism on the Continent made Italy increasingly accessible to Victorian women travellers, not only as a locus of culture, but also of political enquiry. The generic hybridity of travel writing further enabled Victorian women’s political engagement by granting a degree of fluidity between traditionally feminine and masculine genres. In turn, Italy played a foundational - albeit somewhat equivocal - role in British women’s literary professionalization as travel writers. My research focusses on the intersections between political advocacy, gender ideologies, national identity, and literary authority in women’s travel accounts of Italy. It contributes to current literary scholarship on the Risorgimento by providing a sustained analysis of Victorian women’s non-fiction travel writing as an under-represented genre in Anglo-Italian studies. Encompassing both published and unpublished travel writing across a variety of media, it aims to represent a broader diversity of literary responses to the Italian question. Through a comparative framework, I position prominent figures like Mary Shelley, Florence Nightingale and Fanny Kemble alongside marginalized writers such as Clotilda Stisted, Selina Bunbury, Mary Charlton Pasqualino, Maria Dunbar, Janet Robertson and Frances Dickinson, with fruitful intersections. My findings identify a number of shared discourses across these women’s travel accounts in response to discrete political moments 3 within the process of Italian reunification. By attending to such moments as unique discursive events, this study interrogates teleological narratives of British writers’ engagement with the Risorgimento. My analysis shows such discourses to be temporally contingent, being shaped not only by the episodes themselves, but also by extrinsic political and commercial considerations. Personal factors also differentiate individual responses to Italy, with many women travellers parallelling their autobiographical journeys with the peninsula’s political travails. However, my findings equally undercut a mutually reinforcing, proto-feminist narrative of women travellers’ liberal engagement with the Risorgimento. Instead, this study delineates the tensions as well as the synchronicities between representations of the female travelling self and Italy, revealing them to be often competing sites of authority.

Few modern economic historians dispute the notion that America's phenomenal economic growth over the last one hundred and fifty years was in large measure enabled by the development of the nation's antebellum Middle West—those states comprising the Northwest Territory and the Deep South that, generally, are located between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. By far, the labor of 14.8 million people, who emigrated there between 1830 and 1860, was the most important factor propelling this growth.

Previously, in their search for the origins of this extraordinary development of America's heartland, most historians tended to overlook the voices of a variety of peoples—African Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans, and artisans—who did not appear to contribute to the historical view of the mythic agrarian espoused by Thomas Jefferson and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. Another marginalized voice from this era—one virtually forgotten by historians—is that of English women travel writers who visited and wrote about this America. Accordingly, it is the aim of this dissertation to recover their voices, especially regarding their collective observations of the economic development of America's antebellum Middle West.

After closely reading thirty-three travel narratives for microeconomic detail, I conclude that these travelers' observations, when conjoined, bring life in the Middle West's settler environment into sharper focus and further explain that era's migratory patterns, economic development, and social currents. I argue these travelers witnessed rabid entrepreneurialism—a finding that challenges the tyranny of the old agrarian myth that America was settled exclusively by white male farmers. Whether observing labor on the farm or in the cities, these English women travel writers labeled this American pursuit of economic opportunity—"a progress mentality," "Mammon worship," or "go-aheadism"—terms often used by these writers to describe Jacksonian-era Americans as a determined group of get-ahead, get-rich, rise-in-the-world individuals. Further, I suggest that these narratives enhanced migratory trends into America's antebellum Middle West simply because they were widely read in both England and America and amplified the rhetoric of numerous other boosters of the promised land in America's Middle West.

From the adventures of Odysseus to those of the male Grand Tourist, travel has often been regarded as an important rite of masculine self-fashioning. However, as this thesis argues, travel and travel writing also provided a valuable opportunity for women's self-fashioning: journeys offered women a means of altering themselves, enabling them to assume a novel identity abroad and in text, whether it be a subversive or idealised version of themselves. Drawing upon Judith Butler's and Sidonie Smith's theories of performativity, this thesis investigates Victorian women travel writers' impulse to self-fashioning, and argues for travel writing as a performative act of identity-formation. Drawing on Butler's notion of subversive repetition, this thesis also demonstrates the ways in which the instability of women authors' narrative identities gives them a potential for agency, enabling authors to unsettle prescribed gender boundaries and challenge cultural constructions of femininity. In particular, I examine the constructed textual travel identities of the following nineteenth-century British women: Anna Jameson, Susan Horner, Emily Lowe, and Frances Minto Elliot. I highlight the discursive strategies that these four authors use in order to create certain images of themselves for their readers in their travelogues about Italy, all published (or, in the case of Horner, written) between the years 1826 and 1881. Jameson, Horner, Lowe, and Elliot also reconfigure traditional notions of travel and gender in their travelogues to articulate and perform definitions of selves that are not necessarily exemplary – at least not at first glance. I examine the ways in which these nineteenth-century authors adopt apparently undesirable selfhoods ('ill', 'intellectual', 'unprotected', and 'idle') and turn supposed weaknesses into strengths. This thesis also analyses the significance of Italy for the travel narrators and their self-representation in relation to the peninsula. Italy signalled a meaningful difference from Britain, and these authors represent it as a positive space for healing, intellectual growth, pleasure, fulfilment, and self-determination. The constructed identities of these four authors result in 'travel performances' that aim to persuade readers of the narrators' aptitude for travel and of their especially meaningful attachment to, experience of, and understanding of Italy. This thesis does not only provide a space for voices which have until now been little recognised in contemporary scholarship. It also sheds light on an important form of Victorian women’s writing that was a valuable route towards cultural and intellectual authority and self-empowerment, as well as a means of personal and professional self-fashioning.

My dissertation examines how heroines in nineteenth-century British Literature manipulate conventional objects of feminine culture in ways which depart from uses associated with Victorian marriage plots. Rather than use fashionable objects to gain male attention or secure positions as wives or mothers, female characters deploy self-fashioning tactics to travel under the guise of unthreatening femininity, while skirting past thresholds of domestic space. Whereas recent Victorian literary and cultural criticism identifies female pleasure in the form of consumption and homosocial/erotic desire, my readings of Victorian fiction, from doll stories to the novels of Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Marie Corelli, consider that heroines find pleasure in deploying fashionable objects – such as dolls, clothes, cosmetics, and jewelry – which garner access to public space typically off limits for Victorian women. In the first chapter, girls use dolls to play in wilderness spaces, fostering female friendships. Muted dress provides a cloak of invisibility, allowing the heroine to participate in the pleasure of ocular economies in the second chapter. The third chapter features a female detective who uses cosmetics to disguise her infiltration of men’s private spaces in order to access private secrets. Finally, the project culminates with jewelry’s re-signification as female success in the publishing world. Tracing how female characters in Victorian fiction use self-fashioning as a pathway, this study maps the safe travel heroines discover through wild landscapes, urban streets, and professional arenas. These spaces were often coded with sets of conditions for gendered interactions. Female characters’ proficient self-styling provides mobility through locations guarded by the voices of neighbors, friends, and family who attempt to keep them in line with Victorian gender conventions. Female characters derive an often unexplored pleasure: the secret joy of being where they should not and going against what they are told. In the novels I examine, female protagonists navigate prolific rules and advice about how to arrange and manage their appearances, not to aspire to paragons of Victorian beauty and womanhood but in order to achieve physical and geographic mobility outside domestic interiors.

This thesis uses affect theory and studies of emotion to analyse literary representations of the everyday in fictional and non-fictional writing about Muslim migrant women in the UK from 1906 to 2012. Postcolonial literary studies tend to value exceptional events over mundane life, which causes possible issues of exoticism and a danger of homogenising distinct experiences. This thesis offers a theorisation of migration that foregrounds everyday experience through an engagement with theories of objects, bodies and space, as well as emotional experiences that are specific to migrant subjectivity. It analyses two groups of texts: early twentieth century travel writing by Atiya Fyzee, Shahbano Begum Maimoona Sultan and Zeyneb Hanoum, and contemporary literary texts by Yeshim Ternar, Farhana Sheikh, Monica Ali, Leila Aboulela, Elif Shafak and Fadia Faqir. The thesis is structured thematically into three sections, each section containing two chapters, one about travel writing and another about contemporary texts. In the first section, in order to examine how the texts negotiate foreignness in daily life, I consider hospitality theory, which describes how social power relations are based on roles of host and guest. In the second section, I argue that melancholia is an emotional experience endemic to migrancy. The texts demonstrate how this emotion is manifest communally as well as individually, which also shows the political potential of emotion. In the third section, I investigate how emotional processes of migration are described spatially in the texts. The findings of this research show that emotional knowledge is a major concern for migrant writers as a way of engaging with and critiquing the social and political climates of each text. This is produced through narrations about feeling in general and specific emotions, such as irritation or anxiety. Emotional experience is illustrated in conjunction with identities that are both fluid and intersectional, where gender and class converge with ethnicity and religion. The texts also show specifically affective styles of writing that concentrate on focalising women's intimate experiences through, for example, diary entries, bildungsroman or psychological realism. While the differing contexts reflect the particularities of each experience, there are sufficient similarities of narrative content and style to suggest that affective experience is a major concern for this body of literature. Overall, this thesis demonstrates the productive uses of affect theory as a critical stance for analysing postcolonial literature.

My study of women travel writers and imperialism is informed by four inseparable concerns, namely the distinctive characteristics of travel writing by women; how these reflected and reproduced spatial differentiation, notably between spheres of patriarchal and imperial power and authority; how the subject positions of women travel writers were constructed in terms of difference, primarily along lines of gender, race and class, and how such constructions varied over space and time; and how women’s journeys represented only one moment in their travels and subsequent writings. These concerns are themselves informed by debates about women as a focus of historical research, western women and imperialism, and the place of women in a historiography of geography. Overall, I aim to illustrate the significance of poststructuralist feminist and literary theory in both historical geography and histories of geography. Before focussing on how women travel writers negotiated 'home' and away, private and public spheres, I outline the material and metaphorical significance of travel and travel writing, the distinctive nature of imperial literary representation, and how both travel writing and imperial representation more broadly were differentiated by constructions of gender. Rather than replicate imperial discourses of difference, I attempt to expose their ambivalence and the instability of 'home' and 'truth' as both material and metaphorical reference points. Throughout my study, I focus on the travels and writings of Mary Kingsley, who travelled in West Africa in the 1890s, wrote two books about her travels, and became a well-known figure on her return because of her support of trade and her criticisms of the British Crown Colony system. Rather than celebrate an individual, however, I discern subject-positionality in discursive terms. Three moments comprise travel and structure my account. I perceive departure to relate to constructions of gendered subjectivity both prior to and during a journey. Preparations for departure, motives, expectations, conduct books and general logistics were clearly differentiated by gender. Unstable and ambivalent constructions of gender difference informed and emerged from Mary Kingsley's travels and writings. I discuss her journey in terms of how discourses of difference varied over imperial space. Mary Kingsley was primarily constructed in terms of gender subordination while at home, but able to share in racial superiority while travelling in the context of imperialism. Finally, on her return, Mary Kingsley was once again primarily identified in terms of gender difference. However, her gendered subjectivity and mediation of public and private spheres were more ambivalent than fixed, as were the differences perceived to exist between 'home' and away. I also outline institutional responses to women travellers, with reference to debates concerning the admission of women Fellows to the Royal Geographical Society and 'new women' of the 1890s. Imperial women's travels and their writings were clearly distinctive in material ways. These ranged from preparations prior to departure, the nature of the journey, and the reception of both women and their writings on their return. A journey itself thus represents only one moment of travelling, inseparable from departure and return. Because of the gendered significance of material travel, the metaphorical immanence of travel should also be seen as clearly gendered. Implications include the inseparability of discourses of power, 'truth' and knowledge, and, more tangibly, the need to deconstruct theory, 'home' and difference.

Travel writing is by definition an open and hybrid form that encompasses a variety of genres, styles, and modes of presentation. This study focuses on four little-known travel texts about Italy written between 1840 and 1880 by two English and two German women writers and shows how, by exploiting the openness of the form of travel writing, they broadened its scope beyond mere description to provide insight into national ideologies and identities while expanding the boundaries of the female sphere of influence. This study considers the following texts: Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844), Adele Schopenhauer’s Florenz: Ein Reiseführer mit Anekdoten und Erzählungen (1847/48) (2007), Frances Power Cobbe’s Italics: Brief Notes on Politics, People, and Places in Italy, in 1864 (1864), and Fanny Lewald’s Reisebriefe aus Deutschland, Italien und Frankreich 1877, 1878 (1880). In the first chapter, the four texts under consideration are presented against the backdrop of nineteenth-century sexual ideology of the ‘separate spheres’ and the conventions of women’s travel writing. A survey of the long tradition of English and German travellers to Italy and their writings is provided to establish the context in which the texts were produced. Also considered is the role they play in the narrative of Italian nation-building. In the second chapter, the discussion of Rambles in Germany and Italy examines how, by presenting herself as a mother and an educator, Shelley foregrounds the pedagogical purpose of the book, which aims at garnering the sympathy of her British audience for the oppressive political situation of the Italian people and their growing nationalism. The third chapter explores Schopenhauer’s attempt in Florenz to create her own gendered version of the guidebook for travellers in the style of Murray and Baedeker and to revive the memory of the democratic institutions of thirteenth-century Florence at a time when Italians were fighting for democratic reforms and independence. The fourth chapter shows how, in Italics, the representation of Italy in the wake of its partial unification in 1861 is closely intertwined with Cobbe’s own thinking on politics, religion, and women’s emancipation. The fifth chapter examines how, in Reisebriefe, the discussion of the social and political changes that had affected both Italy and Germany in the previous forty years allows Lewald to engage in a reflection on her own femininity and on the role of women in the newly formed German nation. Shelley, Schopenhauer, Cobbe and Lewald each used travel writing to explore their own identities as women and as writers. Pushing the form beyond exposition into the realm of social commentary, they used it to shape public opinion and to explore new roles for women in society.

碩士
國立交通大學
社會與文化研究所
99
China under Victorian Women Travel Writers’ Pen: An analysis on Mrs. Archibald Little’s Intimate China. 維多利亞時期女性旅遊作家筆下的中國：以立德夫人之《親近中國》為例 Abstract: In 1886, Mrs. Archibald Little accompanied her husband to China. During twenty years there, she was active among the Chinese upper society by starting the Unbinding-Foot Association in Shanghai and was devoted in the cause. She also continued her writing career and published ten books related to China. This thesis used Mrs. Archibald Little’s Intimate China: The Chinese as I have Seen Them as main analysis materials. Introduction included research motive and research metholodgy. Chapter One, Roles of Victorian Women, focuses on Victorian womanhood. It is separated into three parts: first, women’s social roles and responsibilities; second, the social values that were presented by other women travel writers; third, the dialogues and interactions between women travel writers and Chinese society, and three different types of women travel writers in China. Chapter Two, The Littles in China, is separated into four sections: first, her life and publications prior to marriage; second, her life and adventures in China; third, her publications related to China; fourth, her life and publications. Chapter Three, Presenting China under the Framework of British Empire, is separated into three parts: first, the analysis of Intimate China; second, culture shock and Mrs. Little’s Chinese experience; third, discussing the Unbinding foot movement and Mrs Little’s views of Chinese women. Conclusion, summarizes Mrs. Little’s life and discusses how others viewed her.

碩士
國立中正大學
台灣文學所
98
Owing to the globalization and efficient domestic and foreign information, travelling has become a national sport and formed a fever of travel writing. The study aims to discuss antecedent female travel poets first, which finds the female travel writing style goes from reporting to themselves having a mental inward look and self reflection. It is not until the diverse and flourishing travel writing style in the 1990s that do the meaning of travelling be deepened. The researcher chooses four writers of different writing style in new generation- Chung Wen-Yin, Shih Chun-Yu, Hao Yu- Hsiang, and Chang Hui-Ching, and hopes to find the meaning of female poets’ travel writing in new generation through analyzing the texts of their travel prose, encountering with other people during travel and observation while traveling. By means of constant travel, the four female travel writers have different inner ideas and experience. They establish the self-identity by tracking down the classical character and recognize themselves again during the encountering with other people from different place. They feel the change of the times as well as the conflict of different cultures by observing the landscapes while traveling, which initiates the rethinking of the self-faith and the understanding of their inner self. In sum, they pursuit what they want and enrich their own life via continual travel.