Women's travel narratives

A plethora of scholarly works have been published on male Western travelers in the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea regions, however the accounts of female travel writers drawing attention to experiences hidden from history could also be a welcome addition or an alternative discourse with a gender perspective. Motivated by a cross-examination of the original accounts of 240 Western women travelers  in Ottoman territories in the 17th to 19th centuries, showing that over 6000 women travelled and experienced the Orient (Kamberidou 2017, 2016, 2015a), this paper continues the research, examining women’s contributions in times of conflict.

Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of historical women’s travel, whether intentional or not.

Travel and Travail conclusively refutes the notion of female travel in the early modern era as “an absent presence.” The first part of the volume offers analyses of female travelers (often recently widowed or accompanied by their husbands), the practicalities of female travel, and how women were thought to experience foreign places. The second part turns to literature, including discussions of roving women in Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. Whether historical actors or fictional characters, women figured in the wider world of the global Renaissance, not simply in the hearth and home

! Abstract Freya Stark was a solo traveler in the Middle East. She had a talent for portraying the real life of the people she encountered. When people questioned her about the perils of travelling alone in exotic, faraway places widely regarded as " dangerous " , she answered: " what would we say of an electrician so anxious to avoid shocks that he tries to eliminate the current altogether? " She was, moreover, a woman interested in politics, exploration and literature. She had an unstable, bohemian childhood and at the age of 33 she left her mother and started her travels in the East which would result in the production of eight volumes of letters and several books of travel. She was the first European woman to travel into Luristan and she endeavored to rediscover the ancient Arabian port of Cana. Throughout her career, she maintained a deep-rooted conviction in the natural goodness of the people whose lives she tried to share. FreyaStark's travel narratives mainly focused on Turkey, aiming to reflect its culture, traditions and history. Her godson suggests that her human and artistic instincts ran contrary to the belief in British Imperialism. Freya Stark is also known as a feminist, believing in the independence of women. She observed: " The great and almost only comfort of being a woman is that one can only pretend to be more stupid than one is and no-one is surprised. " Drawing on the theories of Karen Lawrence, this paper aims to examine Freya Stark's contribution to travel literature as a feminist travel writer through the examination of her books on Turkey, Ionia and The Lycian Shore.

A pesquisa tem como objetivo tratar sobre o olhar da mulher viajante oitocentista, Maria Graham (1785 – 1842), uma inglesa que nasceu no ano de 1785, sendo uma escritora publicada em seu tempo, tendo trabalhos de traduções, romances, e os diários de viagem: Índia, Roma, Chile, e o seu Diário de uma Viagem ao Brasil, foco desta pesquisa.
O olhar da viajante se focara nas questões sociais e políticas sobre o Brasil no processo da Independência. A literatura de viagem se colocará portanto como documento histórico, no qual é possível recuperar processos, cotidiano e situações históricas que ocorreram no cenário brasileiro, nas cidades visitadas, relatadas por Maria Graham. Dentro da sua narrativa ela observara também as questões culturais, particularmente das mulheres as quais ela observa, questiona e analisa os hábitos e costumes dessas.
A particularidade da visão e do discurso dessa mulher inglesa viajante e escritora diante do cenário da Independência do Brasil se faz de grande importância para compreendermos a dinâmica do seu Diário de viagem.

Palavra-chave: Viajantes. Mulher. Política. Brasil. Inglaterra. Literatura. Sociopolítico.

Book description
The eighteenth century witnessed the publication of an unprecedented number of voyages and travels, genuine and fictional. Within a genre distinguished by its diversity, curiosity, and experimental impulses, Katrina O'Loughlin investigates not just how women in the eighteenth century experienced travel, but also how travel writing facilitated their participation in literary and political culture. She canvases a range of accounts by intrepid women, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters, Lady Craven's Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople, Eliza Justice's A Voyage to Russia, and Anna Maria Falconbridge's Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone. Moving from Ottoman courts to theatres of war, O'Loughlin shows how gender frames access to people and spaces outside Enlightenment and Romantic Britain, and how travel provides women with a powerful cultural form for re-imagining their place in the world.

Reviewed in Early Modern Women 14:1 (Fall 2019), 229-31; Études Anglaises 72:2 (2019), 248-9; Studies in Travel Writing 22:4 (2018), 436-7; Times Literary Supplement (16 November 2018).

Review Excerpts:

'Impressive in its geographical scope … this valuable contribution to studies in travel writing reanimates crucial voices in eighteenth-century literature and culture. Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century would interest scholars focused on alternative literary histories of subjectivity (as distinct from the novel), premodern travel writing, women’s writing, eighteenth-century colonial discourse, the emergence of a secular middle class, politics and British aristocratic identity, eighteenth-century Russia and the Levant, and more.' -- Laura Williamson Ambrose, *Early Modern Women* (2018)

'[A]n important, stimulating addition to the field. O’Loughlin compiles six travelogues by women, loosely pairing them based on the geography of their travels: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Elizabeth Craven (Europe and Turkey), Jane Vigor and Eliza Justice (Russia), and Janet Schaw and Anna Maria Falconbridge (transatlantic travel).... Focusing on the concept of sociality, O’Loughlin deftly explores the ways each woman’s travelogue is shaped by her own culturally mediated understanding of identity, formed within the specific historic and cultural moment.' -- Elizabeth Zold, *Studies in Travel Writing* (2018)

'Katrina O’Loughlin montre bien, au-delà de l’intérêt ethnographique et documentaire des lettres et de leur élégance formelle, que la voyageuse, à travers la représentation de la culture ottomane, interroge l’identité culturelle anglaise (et aussi européenne), les modes de sa sociabilité, son rapport au savoir, dans un contrepoint lucide et conscient des enjeux de l’expérience de l’ailleurs, dimension qui a parfois été laissée un peu de côté par les spécialistes du récit de voyage.' - Études Anglaises (2019)

Russian culture discovered its first “Orient” in the late 18th century when Catherine II extended the boundaries of her empire to Southern Ukraine and the Crimea. While Russians had interacted for centuries with their Asiatic neighbors, they had not systematically characterized them as Oriental “others” until Catherine’s reign. The 1783 conquest of new territory on the shores of the Black Sea, which coincided with the rising popularity of Oriental fashions in West European literature and culture, provided an opportunity to do so. Accordingly, these southern borderlands were the first landscapes in the empire to be elaborately imagined according to the Western parameters of Oriental stylization. An especially powerful stimulus to representations of the Crimea as an
“Eastern” or “Oriental” territory was Catherine II’s trip to the Crimea in 1787. Commentary on the journey, written by the empress herself, members of her entourage, and her various correspondents, illustrates the initiatory formulation of an exotic Crimean imaginary -- a year before Byron’s birth and 12 years before Pushkin’s. This was not yet the full-fledged Orientalism of Said’s classic model and thus, though there is a direct link between Catherinian descriptions of the Crimea and later Orientalist characterizations of the Caucasus, Russia’s encounter with the Crimea is better described as a preliminary process of “otherization”: the production and circulation of images and stereotypes that expressed the region’s “otherness” or ontological difference from the norms of the dominant culture, in this case those of Western Europe. Not surprisingly, initial forays into Orientalist literary discourse were complicated by the fact that Catherine’s empire was hardly a typical Western power at all: geographically, politically, and culturally defined by its position on Europe’s periphery, Russia itself had often been cast in the role of the West’s Oriental other. The annexation of the Crimea provided a welcome opportunity for Russia to more assertively claim the status of a Western-style empire, the rhetorical construction of Russia’s first Orient ultimately providing compelling evidence of Russia’s Western pedigree.

Resumen:
Luego  de  realizar  la  investigación  etnográfica Brotes  nómades,  elegir  el  viaje  como  modo  de  vida en  la  sociedad  actual.  Una  aproximación  antropológicame  decidí  a  abordar  uno  de  los  ejes  que resultó  más  evidente durante  el trabajo  de  campo:  la  intersección del  género  y  del  viaje.  En  este artículo tomo algunos fragmentos de esta etnografía para explorar y reflexionar acerca de cómo la dimensión  de  géneroatraviesa  las  prácticas  de  viaje,  en  particular  las  de  las  viajeras  que  eligen viajar como modo de vida. El análisis se presenta en dos etapas: las reacciones y los discursos que se generan cuando una mujer enuncia que va a partir de viaje sola y cómo esto es vivenciado por ella,  y  los  distintos  encuentros  y  situaciones  que  se  dan  durante  el  viaje  en  los  que  el  género  se torna  una  categoría  clave  de  análisis.  En  particular  me  detengo  en  relatos  sobre  situaciones  de peligro, miradas y juicios respecto a lasprácticas de viaje de estas mujeres.

Abstract:
After  writing  the  ethnographic  research Nomadic  sprouts,  travelling  as  a  way  of  life  in  today's society.  An  anthropological  approachI  have  decided  to  address  one  of  the  lines  that  stood  out when  I  was  doing  field  work:  the  intersection  of  gender  and  travel.  In  this  article  I  take  some examples  of  this  ethnography  to  reflect  on  the  dimension  of  gender  through  travel  practices, particularly those of women travelers who choose travel as a way of life. The analysis is presented in two stages: the reactions and discourses that emerge when a woman states that she is planning to  travel  alone  and  how  this  is  experienced  by  her,  and  the  different  encounters  and  situations that occur during the trip in which gender becomes a key category of analysis, in particular I focus on  stories  about  dangerous  situations,  judgments  and  stares  about  the  travel  practices  of  these women.

Alma Karlin (1889–1950), a round-the-world traveller, intellectual, and writer from Celje, Slovenia, arrived in Japan and lived in Tokyo in the early 1920s, an era which historians consider to be an interim period between the initial expansion of the Japanese Empire to mainland Asia and its end in 1945. The writer’s fascination with the land can be inferred, among other things, from a 35-page description of Japan and the Japanese in her most famous book, Einsame Weltreise (The Odyssey of a Lonely Woman), and passages in Reiseskizzen (Travel Sketches), an earlier work. The article aims to place these travel accounts in the historical and ideological contexts of their time while highlighting some similari ties and differences between the representations of the land and its people by Karlin and those by Isabella Bird (1831–1904). Although Karlin makes no explicit reference to the famous British traveller in her writing on Japan, the article demonstrates that she must have known about Bird’s book Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. It is, above all, her decision to introduce her (German) readers to topoi that were typical of Victorian women’s travel writing which suggests that Karlin partly based her image of Japan, if not even the itinerary of her journey there, on Bird’s bestselling work. Nevertheless, Karlin does not seem to have conformed to the then dominant orientalist discourses on Japan, her representations generally showing none of the Western arrogance that was so typical of her fellow travellers of both sexes.

Kamberidou, I. (2018). Frédéric Barbier, The Greek Dream by Monsieur de Choiseul: The Travels of a European of the Enlightenment. [Review of the Book: Le rêve grec de Monsieur de Choiseul Les voyages d'un européen des Lumières by Frédéric Barbier]. Journal of Modern Greek Studies (Print ISSN: 0738-1727, Online ISSN: 1086-3265), 35, 564–612. The Modern Greek Studies Association. Publisher's VersionAbstract the_greek_dream.pdf

This book provides a thoroughly introduced and annotated edition of *Arctic Adventure,* which Clara Coltman Rogers (Lady Vyvyan) first published in 1961. Aiming to provide its readers with a pocket history of the western Canadian Arctic just prior to the advent of air travel in the North, it uses Vyvyan's and her companion Gwendolen Dorrien Smith's field notes and the latter's extant watercolour sketches to fructify and illuminate the published version, which Vyvyan issued many years later. Focus is also trained on Gwich'in guides Lazarus Sitichinli and Jimmy Koe, as well as the Gwich'in community of Fort MacPherson, Northwest Territories, and the Gwitchin community of Old Crow, Yukon. The introduction considers the women's pioneering travels from Edmonton to Vancouver by way of the Richardson Mountains in terms of feminism's interest in travel and travel literature, generally.

Lady Elizabeth Craven's epistolary travelogue, A Journey Through the Crimea to Constantinople (1789), especially her letters from Athens, present not only the author's rivalry with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her Turkish Embassy Letters but also a critical stance toward the Orient, which depends on the historical developments which turned Britain into a global power and on the change in aesthetic sensibilities from the beginning to the end of the eighteenth century. Craven, who was the first woman travel writer to visit Athens, offers a fragmented and idiosyncratic vision of Greece, asserting her denial of the pursuit of antiquity displayed by Montagu. Rather than describe the antiquities, Craven produces picturesque depictions of private spaces, which were either ignored by or inaccessible to male travellers. Her descriptions represent a development in travel writing, determined not only by gender but also by the search for new sources of aesthetic pleasure.

Participation in the labor market is one of the most important components of integration in the host country. This study is situated on two broad topics: female migration and labour mobility within the European Union. Throughout the research I will explore the nexus between both of them from a gender perspective. Therefore, the legal and political context of Romanians in Spain at the EU level is going to be drawn. The purpose is to understand and examine how institutional processes shape the migratory paths and labour trajectories of qualified Romanian women in Madrid, Spain. This research delves into the specificities and circumstances of the participants in order to understand their labour (im)mobilities as EU citizens and the influences of the institutional shifts and restrictions. Thus to analyze the further consequences on this collective. This dissertation questions at the same time the feminization and disqualification of „care labours‟. The research and conclusions will be built according to the central focus of this research, the life stories of nine Romanian women. Therefore, a qualitative research with an ethnographic approach has been conducted. Their narratives are supported by secondary nature interpretation of policies and literature.
Key words: EU citizenship, mobility, reproductive labours, labour mobility, Romanian, migrant women.

This article focuses on the travelogues that Emily Georgiana
Kemp and Yosano Akiko wrote, less than two decades apart, on
their journeys in Northeast China: The Face of Manchuria,
Korea and Russian Turkestan (1911) and Travels in Manchuria
and Mongolia (1928), respectively. Led by an interdisciplinary
exploration of critical theory in cultural translation, visual studies,
feminist geographies and postcolonial travel writing, it compares
and contrasts the distinct ways in which Kemp and Yosano
approach the ethics of the traveller/travellee encounter, the
aestheticisation of cultural difference in the colonial theatre as
well as the entangled relationship between the verbal and the
visual representations of travel and place, and thereby bear
witness to the storm of geopolitical change then sweeping the
region. While noting significant differences between the
circumstances of Kemp’s 1911 travelogue and Yosano’s 1928
account, the essay explores the ethical and affective implications
of their shifting positionalities in this particularly contested
contact zone.

This article discusses how women’s travel writing may employ humour as a way of deprecating the indigenous culture and of strengthening imperial authority with a specific focus on Deborah Rodriguez’s The Kabul Beauty School (2007) and Beatrice Ethel Grimshaw’s From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands (1907) and selected harem narratives.

Diane Glancy's Claiming Breath (first published in 1992) is a montage of dated diary entries, poems, titled undated prose entries and reflections on Indian oral tradition. In her fragmentary piece Glancy depicts a wide variety of motifs, her newly-acquired feminist awareness being one of the prevailing themes. As a divorcee with adult children, Glancy disengages from inhibiting familial constraints and embarks on a professional and literary career as a poetry teacher and writer. Quite early in the narrative the reader gets familiar with the author's unsuccessful marriage which was the source of oppression. The reason for her staying in such a relationship for nineteen years seems to be the patriarchal model she was brought up in: ''I suppose it's because I'm from a generation whose mothers were homebound. It was my father who was the center of energy for the family'' (51). The birth of the writing self coincides with the divorce and results in abandoning the burden of the generational heritage to begin a '' journey which my mother never made before she folded up her camp'' and to have '' what men have had/liberty to be myself'' (Glancy 87). Indeed, the manifestation of the author's independence is her unrestrained traveling across the US as the piece presents Glancy's one-year journey between the schools in Oklahoma and Arkansas. Travelling is not only the expression of the regained autonomy, but also the source of great pleasure, which is referred to as 'SHEdonism', a peculiar mixture of feminism and hedonism, ''the enjoyment of oneself as a woman'' (Glancy 52). Finally, the journey may be perceived as the opportunity to encounter external otherness, embodied by the drivers who engage in some sort of a silent game with the author. The aim of my paper will be to discuss those three major roles that Glancy's physical and literary journey serves.

Lady Harriet Kavanagh is one of the more notable Irish female travellers to Egypt in the 19th century. This paper aims to give an updated on newly transcribed family letters and diary entries, along with sketches and paintings by Lady Harriet during her two winters in Egypt in 1846 and 1847. Besides Lady Harriet there are several other notable women from Ireland who travelled in Egypt during the 19th and early 20th century, all of whom have, for the larger part, been ignored in travel studies. Drawing on published and unpublished diaries and letters from travels in Egypt this paper will summarise the travels of several Irish female travellers including Marguerite Power, Francis Cobbe, Lady Anson and Lady Inchiquinn.

À l’époque des redéfinitions de l’interculturalité et des migrations mondialisées, une déconstruction de la notion de frontière comme celle proposée par Isabelle Eberhardt – que le présent article s’emploie à analyser – s’avère féconde, en préfigurant l’essor des « littératures migrantes » d’aujourd’hui. Fruit de multiples déplacements – identitaires, spatiaux, interculturels et idéologiques qui, bien que consubstantiels, seront analysés séparément, selon leur spécificité – la pensée eberhardtienne, empreinte de la logique d’une hybridation continuelle, en vient ainsi à construire une perspective dynamique de la frontière, envisagée non plus comme coupure ou barrière, mais comme pont, comme passage entre les cultures. En même temps, loin de toute idéalisation, cette sagesse de l’hybridité léguée par Isabelle Eberhardt n’est pas sans rappeler les écueils de la transculturalité qu’un être hybride, « déplacé », se doit d’affronter.

Esther Bernard (1770-after 1833), also known as Esther Gad or Lucie Domeier, was a German writer and translator of Jewish origin. She took part in the Berlin Salons, was a regular guest at Henriette Herz’s and belonged to the circle of Jean-Paul Richter, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel. She attended the Berlin Opera and the Singakademie Berlin, wrote and translated novels, took part in public debates, defended women's rights, and became known for her argument with the pedagogue Joachim Heinrich Campe. In 1801 she followed her second husband, Wilhelm Domeier, on a trip to Portugal, who in turn was accompanying the Duke of Sussex as his personal physician. In 1802 and 1803 her travel journal was published in two volumes, where she presented various aspects of Portuguese life, including detailed descriptions of the Lisbon opera and in particular the Sao Carlos Theater, which opened in 1793 and became an attraction for many foreign travellers. Bernard’s work has been studied, mostly regarding her role on the feminist thought of the late eighteenth century, but there has been little to no emphasis on her Portugal descriptions, not to mention her remarks about Portuguese music.  While she is undoubtedly an important source for musical research on the Lisbon opera practice of this period, it must be remembered that a traveller always carries a cultural background, from which he not only doesn’t free himself, but which he applies to the reality he wishes to describe, projecting his own habits and expectations. Bernards book brings with it an implicit narrative that reveals her social, political, and religious context, reflecting the Prussian musical practice known to her, but also interesting gender issues, such as her assertion in a literary genre which was predominantly dominated by men.
This lecture examines the musical aspects of Bernard's travel report, as well as letters and unpublished archive material, connecting it to current investigations on Portuguese opera and the Theater Sao Carlos. Furthermore, it will be discussed what can be extracted, from this source, about the musical practice at the Lisbon Opera House, as well as about the German writer herself.

25o ΕΝΤΑΤΙΚΟ ΜΕΤΑΠΤΥΧΙΑΚΟ ΣΕΜΙΝΑΡΙΟ-ΣΥΝΕΔΡΙΟ ΓΙΑ ΥΠΟΨΗΦΙΟΥΣ ΔΙΔΑΚΤΟΡΕΣ – ΝΕΟΥΣ ΕΠΙΣΤΗΜΟΝΕΣ ΚΑΙ ΕΡΕΥΝΗΤΕΣ: «ΖΗΤΗΜΑΤΑ ΜΕΘΟΔΟΛΟΓΙΑΣ ΤΗΣ ΕΡΕΥΝΑΣ ΣΤΙΣ ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΚΕΣ ΕΠΙΣΤΗΜΕΣ»

Περίληψη: Η πόλη Κάδις της Ανδαλουσίας αποτελεί δημοφιλές ταξιδιωτικό προορισμό ιδιαίτερα κατά τη διάρκεια του καρναβαλιού της,  που συγκαταλέγεται στις  ισπανικές γιορτές διεθνούς τουριστικού ενδιαφέροντος. Στα τέλη της δεκαετίας του 70´, μεταδικτατορικά, το καρναβάλι σταδιακά εκδημοκρατίζεται συμπεριλαμβάνοντας στην κοινότητά του  έναν αυξανόμενο  αριθμό γυναικών και ακτιβιστριών, έτσι που σήμερα να γίνεται λόγος για φεμινιστικοποίηση του. Κατά τη διάρκεια του καρναβαλιού οι δρόμοι γεμίζουν από θεατές και  καρναβαλικά συγκροτήματα, ανάμεσά τους γυναικεία και φεμινιστικά , που μέσα από  περφόρμανς ασκούν πολιτική κριτική και σχολιάζουν την επικαιρότητα. Η άνοδος των φεμινιστικών κινημάτων στην Ισπανία από το 2014 και ύστερα, αναζωπυρώνει το ενδιαφέρον για τις φεμινιστικές όψεις του καρναβαλιού του Κάδις προσελκύοντας εναλλακτικό γυναικείο τουρισμό στην πόλη.  Οι μετακινήσεις συνεχίζονται , αφού λόγω της δημοφιλίας τους τα  γυναικεία-καρναβαλικά συγκροτήματα με το πέρας του καρναβαλιού  προσκαλούνται για περιοδείες σε πόλεις της Ισπανίας και της Λατινικής Αμερικής. Η ανακοίνωση παρουσιάζει εθνογραφικό υλικό,  σχετικό με τα φεμινιστικά ταξίδια γυναικών από και προς το Κάδις,  συμπεριλαμβανομένου και της ερευνήτριας, που χαρτογραφήθηκαν κατά τη διάρκεια επιτόπιας έρευνας το 2019. Δίνεται έμφαση στη διαμόρφωση μιας νέας φεμινιστικής τουριστικής κουλτούρας που γίνεται πεδίο επαναδιαπραγμάτευσης των έμφυλων σχέσεων και της παράδοσης, ενισχύοντας τη «μοναδικότητα» του καδιτάνικου καρναβαλιού και την επισκεψιμότητά του.

Η ανακοίνωση έγινε στο πλαίσιο των εργασιών της θεματικής ομάδας: Τουρισμός, αναψυχή και ταξιδιωτικές εμπειρίες: Διεπιστημονικές κριτικές προσεγγίσεις

This is a brief, lite article discussing ayahs' mobility  - that is, the seagoing aspect of their work as domestic caregivers. It makes the distinction between ayahs who travelled (one or twice, with their long-term employers) and travelling ayahs (professional couriers of memsahibs and and children).

Please note that the editor made a mistake in saying I was a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society,  not of the Royal Historical Society. (My fingers are inky blue, not green!)

Abstract: European travel accounts have often been incorporated into scholarship on Safavid Iran as sources for historiography and ethnographic information. The study of previously underexplored travel narratives composed by Safavid Iranians, although outnumbered by European accounts, foregrounds Persian travel writing as a self-referential and self-reflective source for Safavid and Shi‘i historiography. The image of Iran in Safavid narratives of travels, none of which were destined for Europe, emerges in close encounters with Iran’s neighbours in the Muslim world and beyond. Safavid travel narratives, as the site of self-inscription, reveal how Iranians envisaged Iran and their identity in the course of their travels within and outside Iran.

Access:

https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/safavid-persia-in-the-age-of-empires-volume-volume-x-the-idea-of-iran/ch12-the-world-is-an-oyster-and-iran-the-pearl-representations-of-iran-in-safavid-persian-travel-literature

Citation:
Ala Amjadi, Maryam, ‘‘The world is an oyster and Iran, the pearl’: Representing Iran in Safavid Persian travel literature”, in Safavid Persia in the Age of Empires, (The Idea of Iran) Volume X , ed. by Charles Melville (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), pp. 291-308.

This chapter offers a postcolonial feminist reading of the works of the British-Italian travel writer and adventuress Freya Stark (1893-1993), who travelled extensively throughout the Middle East and North African region. Her impact on travel writing as an unmarried European woman traveler, at the beginning of the twentieth century, without income, local connections or colonial rank is notable. This chapter provides close reading, through a postcolonial feminist lens, of two first edition volumes of Stark's autobiographical travel books written during 1928-1939. The analysis explores the commercial nexus of Orientalism, which is the term that refers to Western depictions of the 'Eastern' world (Said E, Orientalism. Pantheon, New York, 1998). It discusses Stark's work in relation to conceived reader expectations, as well as her distinctly ambivalent attitude to British colonial-ism and colonials. I suggest that Stark's ambiguous role, as insider-outsider both within and between the Arab region and British Empire, poses provocative questions about the interrelationships of gender, self and 'Other' within commercialized Orientalist discourse (Ballaster R, Fabulous orients. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005). Stark makes specific discursive moves, not only as a traveler across continents, but in literary, ethnographic and gender terms. These moves manage to disrupt fixed framings, images and descriptions of Arab people, places and gender practices. This chapter therefore makes a unique contribution to theorizing Stark's work and, also, travel writing more generally, locating it as an import discursive genre that is always underpinned by moving practices of gender, politics and power.

The article analyses generic conventions, gender constraints and authorial self-defi nition
in two ante-bellum American travel accounts – Emma Hart Willard’s Journal and Letters,
from France and Great Britain (1833) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad
to Kindred at Home (1841). Emma Hart Willard, a pioneer in women’s higher education
and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, an author of sentimental novels, were infl uential fi gures of
the Early Republic, active in the literary public sphere. Narrative personas adopted in their
travel letters have been shaped by the authors’ national identity on the one hand and by
ideals of republican motherhood, which they propagated, on the other. Both travelogues are
preceded with apologies fi lled with self-deprecating rhetoric, typical for women’s travel
writing in the early 19th century and both are intended to instruct the American reader.
Other conventional features of American antebellum travel writing include comparisons
between British and American government and society with a view of extolling the latter
as well as avid interest in social status and public activities of European women. Willard
and Sedgwick deal with possible gender anxieties of their upper middle-class female
readers by assuring them that following one’s literary or educational vocation in the public
sphere does necessarily mean compromising ideals of true womanhood in private life.

Very few women wrote travel accounts in the Russian context prior to 1825. For this reason alone, each of them is something of a special case and several—such as Catherine the Great or her associate, the princess Ekaterina Dashkova—are quite extraordinary. Another highly unusual specimen is Varvara Bakunina, who wrote an account of accompanying her husband on a military campaign to Iran (or “Persia” as she calls it) in 1796. Reading Bakunina’s fascinating memoir with an eye towards issues of emotion and cognition brings into focus just how prominently peril—and her response to it—figure in this account. Her text explores several dangerous aspects of the journey to Persia and the process—always pointedly successful—by which she came to terms with these. This article also explores the interrelationship in Bakunina’s memoir between fear and femininity: as she herself acknowledges, many of the anxieties that she confronts are the product of her upbringing, and her account must reconcile the narrative and behavioral models of the intrepid traveler with those of the devoted wife. The choices that she makes as a young mother are obscured by both of these.

This article explores travel narratives of Israeli female backpackers, depicting their participation in a tourist rite-of-passage. The exploration addresses the meeting of narratives of the masculine, adventurous male hero, on both local (Israeli culture) and global-Western (backpacking) spheres, with regard to which the travelers position themselves and negotiate their gender identity. The article deals with two complementary sites of tourist gender performances: one is the actual trip and the other is the performance of travel narratives. The fi ndings indicate that the backpackers assume several, shifting, positions in relation to an oppressive masculine social norm: while some adhere to the norm, others resist it through a subversive participation in alternative backpacking activities or through a reinterpretation of the normative activities. The article foregrounds the central role played by the body in mediating between the individual and the collective. Finally, it proposes further research on how culture and tourism are interwoven, so as to allow a nuanced picture of gender construction in women’s biographies in particular, and in the biography of marginalized people in general.