Increasingly Imaginative Geographies: Excursions into Otherness, Fantasy, and Modernism in Early Twentieth-Century Women’s Travel Writing

2017 ◽  
pp. 33-83
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Imaginative Geographies ◽  
Women's Travel

scholarly journals Introduction

Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-33
Author(s):  
Victoria Kuttainen ◽  
Susann Liebich
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Actual Mobility

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.

scholarly journals Confrontations in the New World: Grete Weil's Happy, sagte der Onkel (1968)

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laureen Nussbaum
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
New World ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Women's Travel ◽  
Gender Specific

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.

Nordic Folk Dances as Imaginary Geographies

2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 76-80
Author(s):  
Petri Hoppu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Water Systems ◽  
Nordic Countries ◽  
Folk Dance ◽  
Artistic Creativity ◽  
Nordic Region ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Imaginative Geographies ◽  
The 1960S

Geography is a feature that typically belongs to the realm of folk dance. Folk dances are often defined as belonging to a certain region, and it is seldom they are considered a result of artistic creativity. In the Nordic countries, folk dancers have co-operated intensively since the early twentieth century, sharing dances with each other. In this presentation, I am arguing that this co-operation has created imaginative geographies of the Nordic region, filled not with landscapes, terrains, or water systems, but with movements, holds, and music. As an example, I will present two Nordic folk dance books from the 1960s. In these books, dances are attached to certain geographical areas, which is not merely contextual information but also entails stylistic features of a specific dance. Most dances are connected to a certain parish, and in some cases the province is mentioned, as well. In practice, for most folk dancers, the names of the areas do not have much significance as material domain, but they are elements of a map of a danced region, and as such the dances are a part of imaginative geographies, performed spaces. Following the British geographer Derek Gregory, I see folk dances as a continuation of performances that necessarily creates novelty, which allows one to experience spaces differently. The books are danced atlases presenting the Nordic region as a series of performed spaces. They address how the Nordic region has been represented in a danced form, emphasizing affiliation and unity, as well as distinction and disjointedness.

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
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Permanent Home ◽  
Intimate Knowledge ◽  
Women's Travel ◽  
Critical Literature ◽  
The Way

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.

“The Song They Sing Is the Song of the Road”

Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Walter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
The Road ◽  
Spatial Practice ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
Static Nature

When, in the early twentieth century, British middle-class writers went on a tour in search of their country, travel writing not only saw the re-emergence of the home tour, but also the increasing appearance of the motorcar on British roads. With the travelogue playing the role of a discursive arena in which debates about automobility were visualized, the article argues that, as they went “in search of England,” writers like Henry Vollam Morton and J. B. Priestley not only took part in the ideological framing of motoring as a social practice, but also contributed to a change in the perception of accessing a seemingly remote English countryside. By looking at a number of contemporary British travelogues, the analysis traces the strategies of how the driving subjects staged their surroundings, and follows the authors' changing attitudes toward the cultural habit of traveling: instead of highlighting the seemingly static nature of the meaning of space, the travelogues render motoring a dynamic and procedural spatial practice, thus influencing notions of nature, progress, and tradition.

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