Description
Book SynopsisThis important new collection explores representations of late seventeenth- through mid-nineteenth-century transatlantic women travelers across a range of historical and literary works. While at one time transatlantic studies concentrated predominantly on men’s travels, this volume highlights the resilience of women who ventured voluntarily and by force across the Atlantic—some seeking mobility, adventure, knowledge, wealth, and freedom, and others surviving subjugation, capture, and enslavement. The essays gathered here concern themselves with the fictional and the historical, national and geographic location, racial and ethnic identities, and the configuration of the transatlantic world in increasingly taught texts such as
The Female American and
The Woman of Colour, as well as less familiar material such as Merian’s writing on the insects of Surinam and Falconbridge’s travels to Sierra Leone. Intersectional in its approach, and with an afterword by Eve Tavor Bannet, this essential collection will prove indispensable as it provides fresh new perspectives on transatlantic texts and women’s travel therein across the long eighteenth century.
Trade Review"Following historical and fictional women as they journey transatlantically and beyond, this collection offers welcome insight into the many transformations—material and intellectual—produced by travel. For some, the oceanic journey might be revelatory and liberatory; alternatively or simultaneously, it might reproduce exoticization and empire. In presenting a variety of experiences and imaginings, this book is for interdisciplinary scholars of gender and also race, colonialism, and more in the circum-Atlantic eighteenth century." -- Caroline Wigginton * co-editor of Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions *
"The strengths of this volume are many. Foremost, its clever organization illuminates the resonances between women travelers in different modes: as historical figures, writers, and characters. Its coverage offers fresh new perspectives on transatlantic texts. The combination of these features makes this a useful, indeed indispensable, volume for transatlantic studies." -- Aaron Hanlon * author of A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Tracing the Lives of Transatlantic Women Travelers
Misty Krueger
Part One: (Pseudo)Historical Women’s Travels
1 “Little Atlas”: Global Travel and Local Preservation in Maria Sybilla Merian’s
The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam Diana Epelbaum
2 Thresholds of Livability: Climate and Population Relocation in Anna Maria Falconbridge’s
Two Voyages to Sierra Leone Shelby Johnson
3 Transatlantic Female Solidarity: Two Women Social Explorers and Their Views on Nineteenth-Century Latin American Women
Grace A. Gomashie
4 “The Fair Daughters Of Terra Nova”: Women in the Settler Cultures of Early Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland
Pam Perkins
5 Busty Buccaneers and Sapphic Swashbucklers on the High Seas
Ula Lukszo Klein
Part Two: Fictional Women’s Travels
6 Gender Performance and the Spectacle of Female Suffering in Samuel Jackson Pratt’s
Emma Corbett Jennifer Golightly
7 “That Person Shall Be a Woman”: Matriarchal Authority and the Fantasy of Female Power in
The Female American Alexis McQuigge
8 “I Am Disappointed in England”: Reverse-Robinsonades and the Transatlantic Woman as Social Critic in
The Woman of Colour Octavia Cox
9 Creole Nationalism, Mobility, and Gendered Politics in
Zelica, the Creole Victoria Barnett-Woods
10 Feminine Negotiations within the Colony: Aphra Behn’s
Oroonoko and Phebe Gibbes’
Hartly House Kathleen Morrissey
Afterword
Eve Tavor Bannet
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
