Women, Travel Writing, and Truth [Hardcover]

The issue of truth has been one of the most constant, complex, and contentious in the cultural history of travel writing. Whether the travel was undertaken in the name of exploration, pilgrimage, science, inspiration, self-discovery, or a combination of these elements, questions of veracity and authenticity inevitably arise.

Women, Travel, and Truth is a collection of twelve essays that explore the manifold ways in which travel and truth interact in women's travel writing. Essays range in date from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the eighteenth century to Jamaica Kincaid in the twenty-first, across such regions as India, Italy, Norway, Siberia, Austria, the Orient, the Caribbean, China and Mexico. Topics explored include blurred distinctions of fiction and non-fiction; travel writing and politics; subjectivity; displacement, and exile. Students and academics with interests in literary studies, history, geography, history of art, and modern languages will find this book an important reference.

1. Introduction  Clare Broome Saunders  Part I: Boundaries and Instabilities  2. One Could Never Reckon Up All Her Misstatements! Lies and Deception in the Life and Texts of Kate Mardsen, Traveller to Siberia in the 1890s  Elizabeth Baigent  3. Uncovering Silences: the Elisions in Vita Sackville-Wests Passenger to Teheran  Mary Henes  4. What Norway Really Is : Womens Travel Writing, Reality, and the Supernatural in Nineteenth-Century Norway  Kate Walchester  Part II: Subjectivity and Honesty  5. The Precise and the Subjective: the Guidebook Industry and Womens Travel Writing in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe and North Africa  Lori Brister  6. Refracting the Raj: Hariot Dufferins Photographs of India 18lƒT