Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-52
Author(s):  
Tomoe Kumojima
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Women's Travel ◽  
Fictional Representations ◽  
East West

The introductory chapter provides the historical and cultural contexts to situate the discussions on Victorian women’s travel writing on Meiji Japan in the wider academic debate on the British Empire, Victorian literature, and female travel writing. It provides an overview of Anglo–Japanese relations between 1854 and 1912 to trace shifts in the bilateral relationship and foreground its singularity in a multitude of East–West encounters. It then examines travel writings by both male and female travellers to Meiji Japan and fictional representations of the country in Victorian literature and theatre. It surveys travelogues by a group of female travellers alongside those by diplomats and journalists like Kipling, Japan-related writings by Wilde and Stevenson, and theatrical pieces such as The Mikado. The chapter considers the literary invention of Japan and analyses how women travellers negotiated discursive constraints due to gender and colonialism and challenged mainstream representations of Japan and Japanese people.

Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomoe Kumojima
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Japanese Literature ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
Cultural Contact ◽  
New Imperialism ◽  
Women's Travel

Victorian Women’s Travel Writing on Meiji Japan: Hospitable Friendship explores real-life instances and literary manifestations of cross-cultural friendship between Victorian female travellers and Meiji Japanese, examining its ethico-political significance against the backdrop of British ‘New Imperialism’. Shifting critical focus from the individualist model of subjectivity to affective relationality, Tomoe Kumojima conceptualizes the female travellers’ open subjectivity as hospitable friendship and argues that femininity proves to be an asset in their praxis of more equitable cross-cultural contact in non-colonial Japan. Political affordances of literature are the book’s overarching thread. Kumojima opens new archives of unpublished correspondence and typescripts and introduces contemporary Japanese literature hitherto unavailable in English, shedding a refreshing light on the works of Isabella Bird, Mary Crawford Fraser, and Marie Stopes. The book traverses the themes of identity fluidity, literary afterlife, international female solidarity, literary diplomacy, cross-racial heterosexual intimacy, and cross-gender friendship. It traces the shifts in the representation of Japan in Victorian discourses prompted by Britain’s colonial management, Japan’s successful modernization, the Anglo-Japanese bilateral relationship, and global geopolitics, demonstrating how the women travellers complicated and challenged Oriental stereotypes and imperial binaries by creating counter-discourses through their literary activities. Kumojima also offers parallel narratives of three Meiji female pioneers in Britain and burgeoning transnational feminist alliances. The book addresses the absence of Japan in discussions of the British Empire in the field of literary studies and that of women and female agency in the male-dominated historiography of the Anglo-Japanese relationship.

scholarly journals Women’s travel writing in the cyber-world – ecofeminist and difference feminist approaches in travel blogs

Feminismo/s ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 181
Author(s):  
Mirja Riggert
Keyword(s):  
Travel Writing ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
Gendered Spaces ◽  
Female Role ◽  
Mother Nature ◽  
Female Authority ◽  
Travel Discourse ◽  
Women's Travel

This paper intends to track the development of traditional feminist ideas through the analysis of three contemporary travel blogs. These traditional feminist concepts are to be seen in the construction of a collective female identity that enables transnational and transgenerational solidarity: by receiving and transmitting inspiration, shelter and encouragement among female travellers, the narrators in the blogs create a system of female authority. Within this system, female role models as well as maternal figures become points of reference that help to revalue female attributes. This concept shows allusions to the theory of difference feminism as it is presented in the «symbolic order of the mother» by Luisa Muraro. A similar approach of revaluating femininity happens through the orientation towards ‘Mother Nature’. By staging women’s ability to give birth, cultural ecofeminists like Susan Griffin intend to affirm a close bond between women and nature. This representation of an emphasised femininity becomes a central marker in the narratives of the blogs. While this agenda might be designed to counter gendered spaces and the traditional alienation of women within travel discourse, it is problematised by exclusionary and essentialist definitions of femininity that harden engendered binaries like masculinity/femininity or nature/culture.

Introduction: Experiment and the Art of Writing

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Philipp Erchinger
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
General Introduction ◽  
Experimental Knowledge ◽  
Introduction Experiment ◽  
Relevant Work

The general introduction outlines the topic of the study, experimental knowledge-making in Victorian literature and science, and the practice-based method through which it will be explored. To this end, it provides a brief exposition of relevant work in science studies, sociology and anthropology while emphasising the literary critical perspective of the book. Moreover, the introductory chapter situates Artful Experiments in the field of Victorian literature and science scholarship, showing, by means of two examples from the work of Charles Darwin and Robert Browning, how it deviates from the well established ‘two-way traffic’ approach and what it has to offer instead. The relation between experiment and writing is also introduced and clarified here.

Travel Writing and Mediation in the Lady’s Magazine: Charting ‘the meridian of female reading’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
JoEllen DeLucia
Keyword(s):  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
Women's Magazines ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Regular Feature ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
The One

A regular feature of eighteenth-century periodicals, travel narratives allowed magazine readers to imagine their relationship to the world outside of Britain. Via detailed accounts of a range of serialised, excerpted and abridged travel writings in the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832), JoEllen DeLucia’s essay reveals the role mediation and magazine culture played in producing readers’ sense of women as both self-interested members of the British Empire. Reading texts such as the magazine’s serialisation of Cook’s voyages and the Embassy of Lord Macartney alongside oriental tales and exotic fashion plates, the chapter argues that, on the one hand, travel writing made the world a smaller place, while on the other, its discussions of global politics and theories of good governance, extended the parameters of the feminine sphere. In examining the complex horizontal identifications that magazine travel narratives fostered, DeLucia concludes that women’s magazines present an alternative to the well-worn scripts we have developed about women readers that revolve around the domestic and often very English novel.

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