Women's Mobility, Travel, and Literary Representations in the Long Eighteenth Century
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Date
2020-05-13
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Abstract
My dissertation recovers women’s increased mobility and widened geography represented in British literature of the long eighteenth century when there was a revolution in travel culture. My project revises the current scholarship of eighteenth-century travel literature that centered around a few canonical male writers by recovering the rich tradition of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century women’s travel writings. In chapter one, I focus on several issues of the current model of women’s travel writing and propose incorporating a broader range of texts such as manuscript travelogues and travel fiction for the recovery of more women travel writers in early modern period. Chapter two analyzes single women’s domestic travel represented in Manley’s Letters (1696) and Davys’s The Fugitive (1705), and presents the way how professional women writers used the genre of travel writing to create respectable authorial images in their early careers. In chapter three, I attend to Penelope Aubin’s international travel fiction of the 1720s, arguing that she participates in early-modern knowledge productions of the world through her fictional representations of women’s transnational trajectories in exotic spaces such as the Islamic world and the Far East. Chapter four investigates the reception history of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu whose images as an iconic British female traveler were consumed by the contemporaries and later generations in various ways such as an unfeminine, or immoral traveler. By rewriting the history of travel literature with a focus on women’s travels in the long eighteenth century, my project not only challenges the contemporary discourse that associates women’s travels with danger, but also demonstrates how eighteenth-century readers formed a market for the narratives highlighting women’s increased mobility at home and abroad.
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Women Writer, Women Traveler, Travel Writing, Mobility, Delarivier Manley, Mary Davys, Penelope Aubin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Eighteenth Century British Literature