From the adventures of Odysseus to those of the male Grand Tourist, travel has often been regarded as an important rite of masculine self-fashioning. However, as this thesis argues, travel and travel writing also provided a valuable opportunity for women's self-fashioning: journeys offered women a means of altering themselves, enabling them to assume a novel identity abroad and in text, whether it be a subversive or idealised version of themselves. Drawing upon Judith Butler's and Sidonie Smith's theories of performativity, this thesis investigates Victorian women travel writers' impulse to self-fashioning, and argues for travel writing as a performative act of identity-formation. Drawing on Butler's notion of subversive repetition, this thesis also demonstrates the ways in which the instability of women authors' narrative identities gives them a potential for agency, enabling authors to unsettle prescribed gender boundaries and challenge cultural constructions of femininity. In particular, I examine the constructed textual travel identities of the following nineteenth-century British women: Anna Jameson, Susan Horner, Emily Lowe, and Frances Minto Elliot. I highlight the discursive strategies that these four authors use in order to create certain images of themselves for their readers in their travelogues about Italy, all published (or, in the case of Horner, written) between the years 1826 and 1881. Jameson, Horner, Lowe, and Elliot also reconfigure traditional notions of travel and gender in their travelogues to articulate and perform definitions of selves that are not necessarily exemplary – at least not at first glance. I examine the ways in which these nineteenth-century authors adopt apparently undesirable selfhoods ('ill', 'intellectual', 'unprotected', and 'idle') and turn supposed weaknesses into strengths. This thesis also analyses the significance of Italy for the travel narrators and their self-representation in relation to the peninsula. Italy signalled a meaningful difference from Britain, and these authors represent it as a positive space for healing, intellectual growth, pleasure, fulfilment, and self-determination. The constructed identities of these four authors result in 'travel performances' that aim to persuade readers of the narrators' aptitude for travel and of their especially meaningful attachment to, experience of, and understanding of Italy. This thesis does not only provide a space for voices which have until now been little recognised in contemporary scholarship. It also sheds light on an important form of Victorian women’s writing that was a valuable route towards cultural and intellectual authority and self-empowerment, as well as a means of personal and professional self-fashioning.

L’enjeu de cette étude est de défiger l’image du patriote lorrain enraciné dans sa petite patrie, qui l’emporta dans l’histoire littéraire : à Barrès, défenseur de l’enracinement, répondrait Gide, le voyageur. De 1887 à 1923, Maurice Barrès effectua une quarantaine de voyages à l’étranger. En repartant du chapitre qu’Albert Thibaudet consacra au voyageur dans La Vie de Maurice Barrès, oninterrogea l’hypothèse selon laquelle Barrès se forma un itinéraire esthétique et intellectuel à partir de ses voyages. Contre la dualité diachronique de l’écrivain, qui passa du Culte du Moi au Roman de l’énergie nationale, on dégagea une trajectoire en quatre temps : Barrès se mit à l’école de l’Italie, de l’Espagne, de l’Orient, et, durant la période de définition de son nationalisme, interrogeaparticulièrement la leçon de la Grèce. En plus de considérer le voyage comme un lieu éduquant l’esthète et l’écrivain, on analysa l’instruction apportée par l’étranger à l’homme politique. À cette fin, on fonda la réflexion sur les manuscrits du fonds Barrès de la BnF et on privilégia une approche génétique, qui remette en mouvement l’écrivain. Par l’intermédiaire de Barrès, on entend saisir larenaissance que connut le voyage d’écrivain, sous l’influence du modèle des esthètes anglais, dans le contexte des redécouvertes artistiques et de la montée des tensions internationales. / The aim of this thesis is to challenge the prevailing image of Maurice Barrès in literary history as a patriotic native of Lorraine, deeply rooted in his homeland: Barrès is considered a defender of local roots, as opposed to Gide, seen as a traveller. From 1887 to 1923, Maurice Barrès made around forty journeys abroad. In revisiting the chapter which Albert Thibaudet dedicated to the traveller in La Vie de Maurice Barrès (The Life of Maurice Barrès), we question the hypothesis that Barrès shaped himself an aesthetic and intellectual path, drawing from his travels. Against the diachronic duality of the writer, whose mind-set evolved between publication of the Culte du Moi (The Cult of the Self) and the Roman de l'énergie nationale (Novel of National Energy), there emerges a four step path: he looked to and was influenced by different schools of thought from Italy, Spain, the Orient and, during the period in which his sense of nationalism was formed, he examined the Greek lesson in particular. As well as considering travel as something which educated both the aesthete and the writer, we analyse the knowledge acquired by the politician on his travels abroad. To that end, focus is placed upon manuscripts from the Barrès fonds of the BnF and the emphasis is on a genetic approach. Through Barrès, we follow the rebirth of the writer's journey, influenced by the model of the English aesthetes, in the context of artistic rediscoveries and a rise in international tensions.

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