scholarly journals A Far Away and Nameless State: The Travel Narratives of Frieda Lawrence and Caitlin Thomas

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Katherine Collins

Not I But the Wind ... and Leftover Life to Kill, the somewhat obscure mid-twentieth-century memoirs by Frieda Lawrence and Caitlin Thomas, were written, at least in part, in the countries that the authors eventually made their permanent home: New Mexico and Italy, respectively. While neither was marketed as a ‘travel book’, both works share many of the characteristics identified in the critical literature on women's travel writing, such as the way the memoirs were received as emotional outpourings with little authority outside the personal sphere and little of interest aside from their intimate knowledge of the authors' respective literary spouses. The analysis presented in this article shows that while Frieda and Caitlin sought to escape the gendered and classed strictures that so oppressed them in England, they applied them nevertheless to the individuals they encountered on their travels. Turning to the issue of viewpoints and watching, the article explores the frequency with which both narrators chose to position themselves behind windows as they set their scenes, indicating a more complex interrelation between watcher and watched than might first be assumed.

Viatica ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe ANTOINE ◽  

The article focuses on the fleeting romantic encounters present in 19th century travel writing. Fantasy and reality remain distinct, shown through lived experiences and written traces: the traveller is often disappointed by these fleeting encounters. Travel writing of the Romantic period is therefore a space for tension between imaginary fantasy, in part shaped by a series of cultural precepts, and real lived experience. These texts thus pave the way for a process of demystification.


Author(s):  
Maria Zulmira Castanheira

A genre prone to the thematization of cultural difference, travel writing has, in recent decades, attracted great attention within the area of the Social Sciences and Humanities and gained the respect of both academics and critics. Travel writers are mediator fgures who, through their literary constructs, resulting from their experience of mobility and confrontation with alterity, may shape and circulate positive ideas about foreign cultural realities, thus facilitating openness to difference, empathy, acceptance, understanding, admiration. This article analyses Sybille Bedford’s and Brigid Brophy’s representation of Portugal, paying attention to the authors’ focus on the natural and built landscapes and the way they seek out what they considered to be unique to this Iberian country, thus promoting an image of it as a spellbinding place, charming and exotic, worth the journey.


Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-33
Author(s):  
Victoria Kuttainen ◽  
Susann Liebich

This special section considers the interconnections of print culture and mobility across the Pacific in the early twentieth century. The contributors explore how print culture was part of the practices, experiences, mediations, and representations of travel and mobility, and understand mobility in a number of ways: from the movement of people and texts across space and the mobility of ideas to the opportunities of social mobility through travel. The special section moves beyond studies of travel writing and the literary analysis of travel narratives by discussing a range of genres, by paying attention to readers and reception, and by focusing on actual mobility and its representation as well as the mediation between the two.


2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-27
Author(s):  
Maureen Mulligan

Abstract This article offers a discussion of two books by British women which describe travels in Spain during the post-war period, that is, during the dictatorship of General Franco. The aim is to analyse how Spanish culture and society are represented in these texts, and to what extent the authors engage with questions of the ethics of travelling to Spain in this period. Two different forms of travel - by car, and by horse - also influence the way the travellers can connect with local people; and the individual’s interest in Spain as a historical site, or as a timeless escape from industrial northern Europe, similarly affect the focus of the accounts. The global politics of travel writing, and the distinction between colonial and cosmopolitan travel writers, are important elements in our understanding of the way a foreign culture is articulated for the home market. Women’s travel writing also has its own discursive history which we consider briefly. In conclusion, texts involve common discursive and linguistic strategies which have to negotiate the specificity of an individual’s travels in a particular time and place. The authors and books referred to are Rose Macaulay’s Fabled Shore: From the Pyrenees to Portugal (1949) and Penelope Chetwode’s Two Middle-Aged Ladies in Andalusia (1963).


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-159
Author(s):  
Roger Brooke

Abstract Jung’s dreams about Africa reveal the Whiteness and colonialist assumptions typical of the twentieth century educated European. Jung’s visits to Africa and New Mexico, and his dreams are critically discussed, showing how, even decades later, Jung failed to use his own theory of dreaming with regard to his own dreams. The compensatory function of his dreams was never effected, and his transference fantasies of Africa and blackness were reinforced rather than analyzed. There were unfortunate consequences for the development of his thinking and his understanding of the individuation process, since his oppositional thinking in terms of White and Black remained as a concrete transference fantasy as well as a colonialist attitude towards his internal world. The Nguni term ubuntu, will be used to reimagine individuation in more explicitly ethical and socially embedded ways. With regard to the development of consciousness, a distinction is developed between the withdrawal of projections and as a helpful therapeutic issue and as an epistemological approach to the place of meaning. If Jung’s dreams of Africa had managed to “heal” him, Jungian psychology would look rather like it does today, because the way out of Jung’s Colonialism is to be found in Jung’s life and work, especially in his alchemical studies.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laureen Nussbaum

In her essay “Travel Writing and Gender,” the British scholar Susan Bassnett makes two  points that are relevant in analyzing Grete Weil’s travel tales, Happy, sagte der Onkel (Happy, Said My Uncle). Bassnett remarks that “increasingly in the twentieth century, male and female travelers have written self-reflexive texts that defy easy categorization as autobiography, memoir, or travel account.” This observation certainly holds true for Grete Weil’s slim volume, and so does Bassnett’s gender-specific assertion that there is a “strand of women’s travel writing that has grown in importance in the twentieth century: the journey that leads to greater self-awareness and takes the reader simultaneously on that journey.


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