Recovering Global Women's Travel Writings from the Modern Period: An Inquiry into Genre and Narrative Agency

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the specific strategies by which authors of the travel writing genre seize narrative agency. Throughout its centuries-long history, the genre of travel writing has offered multiple generations of authors a means by which to convey observations of the real world within the context of a personally meaningful journey, while offering readers access to geographical, cultural, and psychological worlds otherwise inaccessible to them. An ambiguous medium that takes advantage of all the representational and authenticating mechanisms of nonfiction, while never fully abandoning the imaginative privileges of fiction, the genre of the travel narrative interrogates boundaries of form within literary knowledge.

Through a detailed exploration of the travel genre's representational strategies and the various uses to which these strategies have been put, this dissertation offers new interpretations and perspectives on this distinctive literary medium of creative and scientific expression. In particular, this study contributes to the critical recovery of under-recognized works by selected women authors. I demonstrate how these authors employ the narrative strategies of the travel writing genre as the vehicle by which to achieve their representational goals in other discourses from which they were excluded, such as policy, law, and anthropology, by virtue of their race, gender, or class. I show how travel writing enabled these women authors to subvert their exclusion from professional and intellectual discourses, and to self-memorialize their contributions to these fields of knowledge.