Narrating Travel, Narrating the Self: Considering Women‘s Travel Writing as Life Writing

2014 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoë Kinsley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Self ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Autobiographical Texts ◽  
Women's Travel ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Travel Accounts

This article considers the ways in which eighteenth-century womens travel narratives function as autobiographical texts, examining the process by which a travellers dislocation from home can enable exploration of the self through the observation and description of place. It also, however, highlights the complexity of the relationship between two forms of writing which a contemporary readership viewed as in many ways distinctly different. The travel accounts considered, composed (at least initially) in manuscript form, in many ways contest the assumption that manuscript travelogues will somehow be more self-revelatory than printed accounts. Focusing upon the travel writing of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Katherine Plymley, Caroline Lybbe Powys and Dorothy Richardson, the article argues for a more historically nuanced approach to the reading of womens travel writing and demonstrates that the narration of travel does not always equate to a desired or successful narration of the self.

The Relationship between Seeker and Spiritual Guide as portrayed in contemporary Western Sufi Autobiographies

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-332
Author(s):  
Kate Zebiri
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

This article aims to explore the Shaykh-mur?d (disciple) or teacher-pupil relationship as portrayed in Western Sufi life writing in recent decades, observing elements of continuity and discontinuity with classical Sufism. Additionally, it traces the influence on the texts of certain developments in religiosity in contemporary Western societies, especially New Age understandings of religious authority. Studying these works will provide an insight into the diversity of expressions of contemporary Sufism, while shedding light on a phenomenon which seems to fly in the face of contemporary social and religious trends which deemphasize external authority and promote the authority of the self or individual autonomy.

scholarly journals BREAKING THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PACT: TRUTH AND LIFE-WRITING IN ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME.

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
María Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Autobiographical Texts ◽  
Critical Responses ◽  
Autobiographical Work ◽  
The Relationship

Much of the focus on truth in critical responses to Fun Home has surrounded the use of archival evidence and the access to truth provided by the graphic medium. This article will explore these issues as well as the relationship to truth established by the text’s metafictional devices and interactions with genre, particularly the genre of the Bildungsroman. This article will analyze the commentary the text provides not just on its own relationship to truth, but the role of truth in autobiographical texts in general, and in women’s and other marginalized groups’ autobiographical texts in particular. In the context of a critical landscape in which the veracity of autobiographical work by women is often subject to skeptical criticism, this article will argue that Fun Home acts, not as an exception to the genre of autobiography, but as a commentary on the gap between the presumed autobiographical pact and the historical, political, and aesthetic reality of autobiographical works.

"Picnics with the Mujaheddin"

Journeys ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Kerry Featherstone
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Operation Enduring Freedom ◽  
The Self ◽  
Time Operation ◽  
The Relationship

This article considers the stated motivations for travel in the case of three examples of travel writing about Afghanistan. Jason Elliot’s An Unexpected Light documents his travel in 1984 during the war between the Afghan Mujaheddin and the Soviets; Jonny Bealby’s For a Pagan Song, first published in 1998, takes place during the civil war between Mujaheddin and the Taleban; Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between was written about travel between 2000 and 2002, during which time Operation Enduring Freedom was launched against the Taleban. The article deploys Genette’s concept of paratexts in order to show how the acknowledgments, blurbs, and other paratextual material, when read against the grain, undermine the relationship between the writer and their stated motivations and, thus, destabilize the self-representation of each writer in the course of the narrative. The outcome of these readings is a critique of the three texts, arguing that each one works to justify their travel through a combination of self-narration and paratextual material but that none of them address the implications of their travel for the Afghan people or that the purpose of the travel is to write the text.

Tracing the Local: The Translator-Travellee in French Accounts of India

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 66-77
Author(s):  
Sanjukta Banerjee
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Travel Accounts

This paper examines aspects of multilingual India as described in a few eighteenth-century French travel accounts of the subcontinent to underscore the interactional history of representation that the conventions of European travel writing have tended to elide, particularly in the context of the subcontinent. It draws on the notions of fractal and vertical in travel to examine vernacular-Sanskrit relations encountered by the travellers, and to render visible the role of the “translator-travellee” in embedding vernacular knowledge in international discursive networks. Rather than merely questioning the travellers’ often skewed and necessarily partial readings of India’s linguistic plurality, I approach these travel accounts as crucial for understanding the specificity of the region’s multilingualism, one that was largely incommensurable with the typology of language that the accounts seek to establish.

A European Contact Zone: Portugal and Britain in Marianne Baillie's Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822, and 1823

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Elke Mettinger
Keyword(s):  
Contact Zone ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
European Contact ◽  
Historical Importance ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shed Light

This paper seeks to shed light on the relationship between Britain and Portugal in the 1820s filtered through Marianne Baillie's eyes in her travel writing Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822, and 1823 (1824). Looked at through the lens of transculturation as used in Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes, this relationship – ambivalent though it may be – is perceived along the lines of centre and periphery, domination, and subordination. Portugal is identified as a European contact zone where disparate cultures meet with asymmetrical relations of power. The first part is dedicated to Portugal's entangled post-Napoleonic political situation and to the role of Baillie's letters as eye-witness accounts of historical importance. The second part focusses on Baillie's perception of the Portuguese and their culture, drawing on Jacques Derrida's Of Hospitality to explore the relationship between host and foreigner. It also highlights instances of Baillie's all-pervasive patriotism, which leads to a rather taste-based condemnation of local and living conditions. Her letters combine historical facts and personal impressions while at the same time showing characteristics of travel accounts and women's life writing.

“Pretty as a Picture”

Journeys ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-106
Author(s):  
Imene Gannouni Khemiri
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Aesthetic Sensibility ◽  
Travel Accounts

Recently, there has been an upsurge of interest in travel writing, postcolonialism, and landscape politics. However, studies of travel writing addressing the notion of the picturesque have not yet explored the idea of aesthetic sensibility in British travel narratives in the Regency of Tunis. This article examines the aesthetics of the picturesque in three British travel accounts: Grenville Temple’s Excursions in the Mediterranean: Algiers and Tunis (1835); Robert Lambert Playfair’s Travels in the Footsteps of Bruce in Algeria and Tunis (1877); and Henry Spencer Ashbee and Alexander Graham’s Travels in Tunisia (1887). These travelers used the picturesque in different but interlinked ways; they oscillated between finding the uncanny landscape an object of delight where it conformed to British aesthetic doctrine and an object of derision where they noted aesthetic deficiencies. By the turn of the nineteenth century, this picturesque way of seeing shifted into an Orientalist desire for “Otherness.”

‘She Did but Take up Old Stories’: Generic Fluidity and Women‘s Life Writing of the Early Eighteenth Century

2014 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Joule
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Self ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
Flexible Approach ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Jane Barker ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

In this article I demonstrate the significance of a flexible approach to examining the autobiographical in early eighteenth-century womens writing. Using ‘old stories’, existing and developing narrative and literary forms, womens autobiographical writing can be discovered in places other than the more recognizable forms such as diaries and memoirs. Jane Barker and Delarivier Manley‘s works are important examples of the dynamic and creative use of cross-genre autobiographical writing. The integration of themselves in their fictional and poetic works demonstrates the potential of generic fluidity for innovative ways to express and explore the self in textual forms.

Landscapes of Identity

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Andrea Janku
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Shanxi Province ◽  
The South ◽  
Historical Heritage ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Travel Accounts

This paper is the first part of an exploration into the history and meaning of landscapes, based on a case study of the “must-see” scenic spots or Eight Views (bajing ??) of Linfen County in the south of China's Shanxi province. County histories not only include poems and travel accounts describing these places, but often also, from the eighteenth century onwards, images representing them. They are thus well documented places, which makes it possible to trace fragments of their history and draw conclusions about the relationship between humans and their physical environment. This part of the study focuses on how the physical environment interlocked with the historical heritage of a place to form a cultural landscape that gave identity and meaning to a place and its people.

Diderot, the Self, and the Science of Dreaming

2021 ◽  
pp. 212-232
Author(s):  
Charly Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Philosophy And Religion ◽  
Science Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dream State ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter presents Denis Diderot’s philosophy of the self in light of debates over the neuroscientific turn in historical research. Recent literature features an ideal of self-ownership that the history of philosophy shows to be radically contingent. Situating Diderot’s articles on dreaming and distraction in the Encyclopédie within the context of eighteenth-century theological and medical reflections on the self’s command over its ideas and actions, the chapter interrogates the relationship between science, philosophy, and religion. The dream state fascinated Diderot precisely because its structure and content allowed his contemporaries to reflect upon the fate of the human subject in a materially determined world.

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