Taking the Enlightenment and the feminist tradition to which it gave rise as its historical and philosophical coordinates, Feminism and the Politics of Travel After the Enlightenment explores the coincidence of feminist vindications and travel in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the way travel's utopian dimension and feminism's utopian ideals have intermittently fed off each other in productive ways. Travel's gender politics is analyzed in the works of J.-J. Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, Germaine de Staël, Frances Burney, Flora Tristan, Suzanne Voilquin, Gustave Flaubert George Sand, Robyn Davidson, and Sara Wheeler.

"Taking the Enlightenment and the feminist tradition to which it gave rise as its historical and philosophical coordinates, Feminism and the Politics of Travel After the Enlightenment explores travel as a "technology of gender." It also investigates the way travel's utopian dimension and feminism's utopian ideals have intermittently fed off each other in productive ways. With broad historical and theoretical understanding, Yaël Schlick analyzes the intersections of travel and feminism in writings published during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period of intense feminist vindication during which women's very presence in the public sphere, their access to education, and their political participation were contentious issues. Schlick examines the gendering of travel and its political implications in Rousseau's Emile, and in works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, Frances Burney, Germaine de Staël, Suzanne Voilquin, Flora Tristan, Gustave Flaubert, and George Sand, arguing that travel is instrumental in furthering diverse feminist agendas. The epilogue alerts us to the continuation of the utopian strain of the voyage and its link to feminism in modern and contemporary travelogues by writers like Mary Kingsley, Robyn Davidson and Sara Wheeler"--Provided by publisher.

Richly researched and engagingly written, Political Affairs of the Heart traces the emergence of female sentimental travel writing in late eighteenth-century Britain, and posits its centrality to women’s engagement with national and gender politics. This study examines four travel narratives written by women between 1774 and 1795, convincingly arguing that they effectively deploy the discourse of sensibility to engage with debates around Britain’s national identity during the French and American Revolutions. Van Netten Blimke contends that Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768)—which first introduced sentimental discourse to the travelogue—facilitated women’s gradual inclusion into this previously male-dominated genre, effectively paving the way for women to influence the country’s sociopolitical transformation. These four previously understudied works successfully combine eyewitness authority with the language of sensibility to mount impassioned interventions in their nation’s perception and practice of revolutionary politics, at a time when its national identity was most in flux.

The ‘memsahibs’ of the British Raj in India are well-known figures today, frequently depicted in fiction, TV and film. In recent years, they have also become the focus of extensive scholarship. Less familiar to both academics and the general public, however, are the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century precursors to the memsahibs of the Victorian and Edwardian era. Yet British women also visited and resided in India in this earlier period, witnessing first-hand the tumultuous, expansionist decades in which the East India Company established British control over the subcontinent. Some of these travellers produced highly regarded accounts of their experiences, thereby inaugurating a rich tradition of women’s travel writing about India. In the process, they not only reported events and developments in the subcontinent, they also contributed to them, helping to shape opinion and policy on issues such as colonial rule, religion, and social reform. This new set in the Chawton House Library Women’s Travel Writing series assembles seven of these accounts, six by British authors (Jemima Kindersley, Maria Graham, Eliza Fay, Ann Deane, Julia Maitland and Mary Sherwood) and one by an American (Harriet Newell). Their narratives – here reproduced for the first time in reset scholarly editions – were published between 1777 and 1854, and recount journeys undertaken in India, or periods of residence there, between the 1760s and the 1830s. Collectively they showcase the range of women’s interests and activities in India, and also the variety of narrative forms, voices and personae available to them as travel writers. Some stand squarely in the tradition of Enlightenment ethnography; others show the growing influence of Evangelical beliefs. But all disrupt any lingering stereotypes about women’s passivity, reticence and lack of public agency in this period, when colonial women were not yet as sequestered and debarred from cross-cultural contact as they would later be during the Raj. Their narratives are consequently a useful resource to students and researchers across multiple fields and disciplines, including women’s writing, travel writing, colonial and postcolonial studies, the history of women’s educational and missionary work, and Romantic-era and nineteenth-century literature. This volume includes 2 texts, Jemima Kindersley, Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies (1777) and Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in India (1812).

This book studies travel writing produced by French authors between the two World Wars following visits to authoritarian regimes in Europe and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). It sheds new light on the phenomenon of French political travel in this period by considering the well-documented appeal of Soviet communism for French intellectuals alongside their interest in other radical regimes which have been much less studied: fascist Italy, the Iberian dictatorships and Nazi Germany. Through analyses of the travel writing produced as a result of such visits, the book gauges the appeal of these forms of authoritarianism for inter-war French intellectuals from a broad political spectrum. It examines not only those whose political sympathies with the extreme right or extreme left were already publicly known, but also non-aligned intellectuals who were interested in political models that offered an apparently radical alternative to the French Third Republic. This study shows how travel writing provided a space for reflection on the lessons France might learn from the radical political experiments of the inter-war years. It argues that such writing can usefully be read as a form of utopian thinking, distinguishing this from colloquial understandings of utopia as an ideal location. Utopianism is understood neither as a fantasy ungrounded in the real nor as a dangerously totalitarian ideal, but, in line with Karl Mannheim, Paul Ricœur, and Ruth Levitas, as a form of non-congruence with the real that it seeks to transcend. The utopianism of French political travel writing is seen to lie not in the attempt to portray the destination visited as utopia, but rather in the pursuit of a dialogue with radical political alterity.

This handbook offers a systematic exploration of current key topics in travel writing studies. It addresses the history, impact, and unique discursive variety of British travel writing by covering some of the most celebrated and canonical authors of the genre as well as lesser known ones in more than thirty close-reading chapters. Combining theoretically informed, astute literary criticism of single texts with the analysis of the circumstances of their production and reception, these chapters offer excellent possibilities for understanding the complexity and cultural relevance of British travel writing.

There is an unfortunate argument being made that feminist scholarship of eighteenth-century literary studies has fulfilled its potential in academic circles. The Future of Eighteenth-Century Feminist Scholarship: Beyond Recovery shows us otherwise. Each of the essays in this volume reaffirms the feminist principles that form the foundation of this area, then builds upon them by acknowledging the inevitable conflicts they or their subjects have faced and the contradictions they or their subjects have lived.

Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politics, 1800–1830: Romantic Crises is a study of the political lives of William Wordsworth and Felicia Hemans between 1800 and 1830. Tracing trajectories from the first decade of the nineteenth century to the meeting of the two authors in 1830, Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politicsargues that the dominant paradigm for their political thought was that of “crisis.” Obsessed with the mysterious connections between the individual, the home, and the state, Wordsworth and Hemans portrayed all three in a common crisis that would be resolved in the future. Both writers articulated historical moments when the tenuousness of the present society gave glimpses into a future one. Building on and reacting to the strong critical statements of the 80s and 90s that tended to see the political views of Wordsworth and Hemans as formed by personal crises, Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politicsargues that far from being tied to personal circumstances, crises were staged by Wordsworth and Hemans to argue for clear political positions on a wide variety of topics. Because crises come with claims of singularity, the use of crises to explain historical change finds its origin in revolutionary ideology. But because imagined crises proliferated throughout the Romantic period, crises no longer signaled earth-shattering change, but business as usual. The ideology of crises carried the tension between revolution and modernity that haunted the Romantic period. Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politicspresents revisionary readings of major works and contributes to long-standing discussions on a number of different topics: dissenting politics, poor relief, gender roles in peace and wartime, and the nature of historical memory, to name a few. By focusing on the dramatic nature of crisis narratives, Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politicsresponds to master narratives of the Romantic period that limit and simplify political expression. The book restores complexity to the political lives of two poets who fashioned revolutionary ideology for their own ends.

Becoming Wollstonecraft: The Interconnection of Her Life and Works draws from biography to explain her works, and it analyses the works to draw a biographical composite of Wollstonecraft. Becoming Wollstonecraft will be more fully developed than previous works, with added information that has not previously been associated with Wollstonecraft, such as the story of Reverend Mr. Joshua Waterhouse. Although there are over fifty book-length biographies published on Wollstonecraft, very few agree on much about Wollstonecraft. She seems to have become an “everywoman,” or a figure unfixed in time and protean. Deemed the Mother of Feminism, like feminism itself, she is what people have wanted her to be and is by no means an immutable or universal personage. A study of her life as evident by her works and vice versa, this monograph intends to refocus the image of Wollstonecraft for students and scholars, informed by biographical texts on Wollstonecraft and on those people in Wollstonecraft’s life and acquaintance, historical context, and exposition from her works.