Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women's Travel Writing

Women experience and portray travel differently: Gender matters irreducibly and complexly. Building on recent scholarship in women's travel writing, these provocative essays not only affirm the impact of gender, but also cast women's journeys against coordinates such as race, class, culture, religion, economics, politics, and history. The book's scope is unique: Women travelers extend in time from Victorian memsahibs to contemporary «road girls», and topics range from Anna Leonowens's slanted portrayal of Siam later popularized in the movie, The King and I, to current feminist «descripting» of the male-road-buddy genre. The extensive array of writers examined includes Nancy Prince, Frances Trollope, Cameron Tuttle, Lady Mary Montagu, Catherine Oddie, Kate Karko, Frances Calderón de la Barca, Rosamond Lawrence, Zilpha Elaw, Alexandra David-Néel, Amelia Edwards, Erica Lopez, Paule Marshall, Bharati Mukherjee, and Marilynne Robinson.

Autorentext

The Editor: Kristi Siegel is Associate Professor of English and Division Chair of Languages, Literature, and Communication at Mount Mary College (Milwaukee, Wisconsin). She is the author of Women s Autobiographies, Culture, Feminism (Peter Lang, 1999, 2001) and the editor of Issues in Travel Writing: Empire, Spectacle, and Displacement (Peter Lang, 2002). In addition, she serves as General Editor for the book series Travel Writing Across the Disciplines (Peter Lang) and has published various articles on postmodernism, feminism, cultural theory, travel writing, and autobiography.

Klappentext

Women experience and portray travel differently: Gender matters irreducibly and complexly. Building on recent scholarship in women s travel writing, these provocative essays not only affirm the impact of gender, but also cast women s journeys against coordinates such as race, class, culture, religion, economics, politics, and history. The book s scope is unique: Women travelers extend in time from Victorian memsahibs to contemporary «road girls», and topics range from Anna Leonowens s slanted portrayal of Siam later popularized in the movie, The King and I, to current feminist «descripting» of the male-road-buddy genre. The extensive array of writers examined includes Nancy Prince, Frances Trollope, Cameron Tuttle, Lady Mary Montagu, Catherine Oddie, Kate Karko, Frances Calderón de la Barca, Rosamond Lawrence, Zilpha Elaw, Alexandra David-Néel, Amelia Edwards, Erica Lopez, Paule Marshall, Bharati Mukherjee, and Marilynne Robinson.

Zusammenfassung
«The contributors to this book are well aware of the complexity of gender and the way that gender operates in different ways in different contexts. The women travelers considered here do not have much in common since they are divided by historical period, privilege, class, race and wealth, but it is the diversity of the women represented which is the book's greatest strength. Although the women do not write in the same way as each other, gender nevertheless manifests itself clearly and makes its presence felt, and we are able to see the way gender operates in particular contexts. This book enables us to move away from assuming that women travelers write in a particular way or in a particular style, with certain themes predominating and toward a type of contextualized analysis, which is subtle enough to unpick the intricacies of the way gender operates.» (Sara Mills, Professor of Linguistics, Cultural Studies, Sheffield Hallam University)

Inhalt

Contents: Kristi Siegel: Intersections: Women's Travel and Theory - Ruth Y. Jenkins: The Gaze of the Victorian Woman Traveler: Spectacles and Phenomena - Sukanya Banerjee: Lady Mary Montagu and the «Boundaries» of Europe - Kristi Siegel: Women's Travel and the Rhetoric of Peril: It Is Suicide to Be Abroad - Jessica Enevold: The Daughters of Thelma and Louise: New? Aesthetics of the Road - Rachel A. Jennings: Women Writers and the Internal Combustion Engine: Passing Penelope Pitstop - Chu-Chueh Cheng: Frances Trollope's America and Anna Leonowens's Siam: Questionable Travel and Problematic Writing - Sarah Brusky: Nancy Prince and Her Gothic Odyssey: A Veiled Lady - Rosetta R. Haynes: Zilpha Elaw's Serial Domesticity: An Unsentimental Journey - Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson: Women's Travel Writing and the Politics of Location: Somewhere In-Between - Corinne Fowler: The Problem of Narrative Authority: Catherine Oddie and Kate Karko - Linda Ledford-Miller: A Protestant Critique of Catholicism: Frances Calderón de la Barca in Nineteenth-Century Mexico - Terri A. Hasseler: Identity in Rosamond Lawrence's Indian Embers: «I cannot somehow find myself» - Kristin Fitzpatrick: American National Identity Abroad: The Travels of Nancy Prince - Margaret McColley: Alexandra David-Néel's Home in the Himalayas: Where the Heart Lies - Kathleen Scullin: A Feminist Lens for Binx Bolling's Journey in The Moviegoer: Traveling Toward Wholeness.