Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843

Published by Bucknell University Press 2021

Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843

Edited by: Misty Krueger
With contributions by: Misty Krueger , Diana Epelbaum , Shelby Johnson , Grace Gomashie , Pam Perkins , Ula Lukszo Klein , Jennifer Golightly , Alexis McQuigge , Octavia Cox , Victoria Barnett-Woods , Kathleen Morrissey and Eve Tavor Bannet

In the series Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture 1650-1850

https://doi.org/10.36019/9781684483006

Overview
Contents

About this book

This 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.

Author / Editor information

MISTY KRUEGER is an assistant professor at the University of Maine at Farmington, where she teaches seventeenth- through nineteenth-century literature and writing. She was the 2017 Jane Austen Society of North American International Visitor, has co-edited an issue for the Austen journal Persuasions On-Line, and has published essays on Austen juvenilia, novels, adaptation, pedagogy, and social media. She has also published on Delarivier Manley, Restoration Shakespearean adaptations, and William Blake.

Reviews

"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

"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

“The volume’s organization, meant to question (and push) boundaries between real and imagined travel, between ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ accounts, is useful. Its most important contribution is the attention to the intersection of gender and empire as well as many of the authors’ careful attention to colonial subjectivity. Those who read, research, or teach this period will certainly find new sources to digest and productive ways of reimagining familiar material.”— Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal

"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

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: Tracing the Lives of Transatlantic Women Travelers Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Contributors Misty Krueger Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART ONE : (Pseudo)Historical Women’s Travels
1 “Little Atlas”: Global Travel and Local Preservation in Maria Sibylla Merian’s The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam Diana Epelbaum Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
2 Thresholds of Livability: Climate and Population Relocation in Anna Maria Falconbridge’s Two Voyages to Sierra Leone Shelby Johnson Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	48
3 Transatlantic Female Solidarity: Two Women Social Explorers and Their Views on Nineteenth-Century Latin American Women Grace Gomashie Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	64
4 “The Fair Daughters of Terra Nova”: Women in the Settler Cultures of Early Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland Pam Perkins Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	81
5 Busty Buccaneers and Sapphic Swashbucklers on the High Seas Ula Klein Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	95
PART TWO : Fictional Women’s Travels
6 Gender Performance and the Spectacle of Female Suffering in Samuel Jackson Pratt’s Emma Corbett Jennifer Golightly Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
7 “That Person Shall Be a Woman”: Matriarchal Authority and the Fantasy of Female Power in The Female American Alexis McQuigge Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	131
8 “I Am Disappointed in England”: Reverse-Robinsonades and the Transatlantic Woman as Social Critic in The Woman of Colour Octavia Cox Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	144
9 Creole Nationalism, Mobility, and Gendered Politics in Zelica, the Creole Victoria Woods Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
10 Feminine Negotiations within the Colony: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Phebe Gibbes’s Hartly House Kathleen Morrissey Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	183
Afterword Eve Bannet Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	207
Notes on Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	221
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223