26028 - Women's Travel Literature

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:

Students are required to read at least two of the following primary texts:

Lady Montagu, The Turkish Embassy Letters (1763)

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

Isabelle Eberhardt, Diary of a Nomad (1923).

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (1988).

Critical Readings:

Susan Bassnett, Travel Writing and gender in Hulme, P., Youngs T. (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, Cambridge, Cambridge University, 2002.

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

Karen Lawrence, Composing the Self in Letters: Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, in Penelope Voyages. Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition, Cornell University Press, New York, 1994.

Hebi Abdal Jaqued, "Isabelle Eberhardt: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Nomad" in Yale French Studies, n. 83, Post/Colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations, and Nomadisms, vol. 2 (1993), pp. 93-117.

Mary Jo Kietzman, "Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters and Cultural Dislocation" in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 38:3 (1998), pp. 537-551.

Anne Schroder, Touring the Site of Caribbean Spirit. Possession in Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, in Justin D. Edwards, Rune Graulund (eds), Postcolonial Travel Writing. Critical Explorations, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2010.

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