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.

In the current academic year, this course is related to other courses within the degree programme that also engage with the macro concepts “Identity, alterity, difference, diversity”.

Readings/Bibliography

Primary Texts for the first module:

Lady Montagu, The Turkish Emassy 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).

Primary Sources for the second Module:

Victorian Women Travellers: Anna Leonewens, Margaret Fountaine, Rebecca West, Isabelle Eberhardt.

Victorian Women Travellers: Anna Leonewens, Margaret Fountaine, Rebecca West, Isabelle Eberhardt.

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

L. Spalding, The Best Women's Travel Writing, vol. 9 (2013).

Secondary sources:

Chapman, J. Stabler, (eds), Unfolding the South. Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy, Manchester, Manchester UP, 2003

Crisafulli Lilla Maria (ed.), British Risorgimento: L'unità d'Italia e la Gran Bretagna, Liguori, Napoli, 2013

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.

Modifica

Teaching methods

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

The course is divided in two modules. The first module will be taught by Prof. Lilla Maria Crisafulli, the second module will be taught by Dr. Carlotta Farese.

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 Lilla Maria Crisafulli

See the website of Carlotta Farese