Travel writing is by definition an open and hybrid form that encompasses a variety of genres, styles, and modes of presentation. This study focuses on four little-known travel texts about Italy written between 1840 and 1880 by two English and two German women writers and shows how, by exploiting the openness of the form of travel writing, they broadened its scope beyond mere description to provide insight into national ideologies and identities while expanding the boundaries of the female sphere of influence. This study considers the following texts: Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844), Adele Schopenhauer’s Florenz: Ein Reiseführer mit Anekdoten und Erzählungen (1847/48) (2007), Frances Power Cobbe’s Italics: Brief Notes on Politics, People, and Places in Italy, in 1864 (1864), and Fanny Lewald’s Reisebriefe aus Deutschland, Italien und Frankreich 1877, 1878 (1880). In the first chapter, the four texts under consideration are presented against the backdrop of nineteenth-century sexual ideology of the ‘separate spheres’ and the conventions of women’s travel writing. A survey of the long tradition of English and German travellers to Italy and their writings is provided to establish the context in which the texts were produced. Also considered is the role they play in the narrative of Italian nation-building. In the second chapter, the discussion of Rambles in Germany and Italy examines how, by presenting herself as a mother and an educator, Shelley foregrounds the pedagogical purpose of the book, which aims at garnering the sympathy of her British audience for the oppressive political situation of the Italian people and their growing nationalism. The third chapter explores Schopenhauer’s attempt in Florenz to create her own gendered version of the guidebook for travellers in the style of Murray and Baedeker and to revive the memory of the democratic institutions of thirteenth-century Florence at a time when Italians were fighting for democratic reforms and independence. The fourth chapter shows how, in Italics, the representation of Italy in the wake of its partial unification in 1861 is closely intertwined with Cobbe’s own thinking on politics, religion, and women’s emancipation. The fifth chapter examines how, in Reisebriefe, the discussion of the social and political changes that had affected both Italy and Germany in the previous forty years allows Lewald to engage in a reflection on her own femininity and on the role of women in the newly formed German nation. Shelley, Schopenhauer, Cobbe and Lewald each used travel writing to explore their own identities as women and as writers. Pushing the form beyond exposition into the realm of social commentary, they used it to shape public opinion and to explore new roles for women in society.

Thesis (M.A. History)--University of Waikato, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-141). Also available via the World Wide Web.

The focus of this study is an investigation of cross-channel exchanges represented in travelogues, historical works, journalism, letters and journals written by English women Frances Trollope, Lady Margaret Blessington, George Eliot and Julia Kavanagh on France and by French women Flora Tristan and Marie Dronsart on England. The work is based on the view that narratives about another culture betray preconceptions and beliefs and are never innocent descriptions. Nineteenth-century English descriptions of France, for instance, are not only marked by the stereotype of the gregarious French bon vivant but also by the often tense political relationship and economical concurrence between the two countries. French descriptions of England reflect the consciousness of England's superiority in the domains of economy, industry and colonialism as well as the stereotype of the boring, monosyllabic, haughty, egoistic and often xenophobic Englishman. Given that writings on the other culture are marked by practices and belief systems as well as notions of superiority and inferiority like texts emerging from a colonial context, ideas which have been developed in this field by scholars such as Sara Mills and Reina Lewis have been used as a basis for this investigation. I argue that the women whose texts I analyse strategically employ 'discourses of difference' (to use Sara Mills' term), or alignment and 'othering' in regard to nation, class, and political opinion, in order to gain positions which allow them to challenge contemporary ideologies of femininity. They take advantage of their positions in very different ways, according to their personal, class and economic situations, their agenda, and their gendered position within society which changes significantly during the century. The English women Frances Trollope, Lady Margaret Blessington, George Eliot and Julia Kavanagh construct themselves as part of the tradition of French salonnières from the seventeenth century to the present, while the French women Flora Tristan and Marie Dronsart align themselves with English travel writers, particularly Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Through a careful construction of these foremothers, which often differed from other representations of them, they criticise gender politics in their own country and endeavour to normalise their own activities as intellectuals and writers, in the case of Tristan as a socialist and feminist activist. This strategy is complemented by 'othering' with regard to nation, class and political convictions which confers on the women an authoritative authorial voice and / or allows them to support their argument. They endorse ideologies of gender, nation and class at the same time as they reject some aspects of them. This study reveals new aspects of nineteenth-century discussions of the so-called 'woman question' through a broader approach which encompasses not only the parameters of gender, class and political orientation but also cross-cultural experience.

Thesis (Ph.D. (English)) - Rhodes University, 2008

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

There are many factors that contributed to the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gendered gaze in women's fiction of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This thesis argues that the visual details in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 are more significant than scholars have previously acknowledged. My analysis of the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney shows that visuality — the nexus between the verbal and visual communication — provided them with a language within language capable of circumventing the cultural strictures on female expression in a way that allowed for concealed resistance. It conveyed the actual ways in which women ‘should' see and appear in a society in which the reputation was image-based. My analysis journeys through physiognomic, psychological, theatrical and codified forms of visuality to highlight the multiplicity of its functions. I engage with scholarly critiques drawn from literature, art, optics, psychology, philosophy and anthropology to assert visuality's multidisciplinary influences and diplomatic potential. I show that in fiction and in actuality, women had to negotiate four scopic forces that determined their ‘looks' and manners of looking: the impartial spectator, the male gaze, the public eye and the disenfranchised female gaze. In a society dominated by ‘frustrated utterance,' penetrating gazes and the perpetual threat of misinterpretation, women novelists used references to the visible and the invisible to comment on emotions, socio-economic conditions and patriarchal abuses. This thesis thus offers new insights into verbal economy by reassessing expression and perception from an unconventional point-of-view.