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26028 - Women's Travel Literature

Academic Year 2018/2019

                
                        Docente:
                        Carlotta Farese
                    
                        Credits:
                        6
                    
                        SSD:
                        L-LIN/10
                    
                        Language:
                        Italian
                    
                        Teaching Mode:
                        Traditional lectures
                        
                            Campus:
                            Bologna
                        
                            Corso:
                            Second cycle degree programme (LM) in
                            Modern, Post-Colonial and Comparative  Literatures (cod. 0981)

                            Teaching resources on Virtuale

Learning outcomes

The student acquires historical and literary knowledge of women's popular culture with specific reference to travel literature and critical utopias, within a gender perspective.

Course contents

Women's travel literature from the 18th cent. to the Present

The course will analyze the strategies of representation of female identity, women's social role and agency in women's travel accounts such as letters, diaries and novels, from the 18th century to the present. It will also investigate the double diversity of women travellers as different both from male travellers and from more socially conformist women. The course will also explore to what extent these texts subvert or reinforce the position of women within the patriarchal social order and in the domestic sphere. For this reason, the texts chosen for the course will be examined within their original cultural and social contexts, and in their interconnection with class, race and gender discrimination.

Readings/Bibliography

Primary Texts:

Lady Montagu, The Turkish Embassy Letters (1763)

Hester Lynch Piozzi, Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany (1789).

Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796).

The Virago Book of Women Travellers ed. by Mary Morris, London, Virago, 1996 (Anna Leonewens, Margaret Fountaine, Isabelle Eberhardt).

Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy (1990).

A. M. Asham, J. E. Gooerkmen (eds), Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey (2006).

Secondary sources:

Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject, London-New York, Routledge, 1994.

Hulme, P., Youngs T. (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, Cambridge, Cambridge University, 2002.

Mills, S., Discourses of Difference: an Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism, London-New York, Routledge, 1993.

Robinson, J., Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers, Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press, 1995

Robinson-Tomsett, E., Women, Travel and Identity: Journeys by Rail and Sea, 1870-1940, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013.

Siegel, K., Gender, Genre and Identity in Women's Travel Writing, New York, Peter Lang, 2004.

Turner, K., British Travel Writers in Europe 1750-1800: Authorship, Gender and National Identity, Aldershot, Ashgate 2001.

Teaching methods

Lectures and seminars. Students will be required to participate actively in class discussion.

Assessment methods

Final oral exam. The submission of an essay may be agreed with the lecturer.

Attendance and class partecipation will also be assessed as a component of the final overall mark.

Teaching tools

Literary and critical texts, power point presentations, web-based resources.

Office hours

See the website of Carlotta Farese