Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition by Karen R.

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Looking at travel writing by British women from the seventeenth century on, Lawrence explores not only the significance of gender for travel writing, but also the value of travel itself in testing the limits of women's social freedoms and restraints...

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

Looking at travel writing by British women from the seventeenth century on, Lawrence explores not only the significance of gender for travel writing, but also the value of travel itself in testing the limits of women's social freedoms and restraints. She shows how writings by Margaret Cavendish, Frances Burney, Virginia Woolf, and others reconceive the meanings of femininity in relation to such apparent oppositions as travel/home, other/self, and foreign/domestic.

Author Biography

Karen R. Lawrence is Professor of English at the University of Utah. She is the author of books including The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses and the editor of Decolonizing Traditions: New Views of Twentieth-Century "British" Literary Canons and The McGraw-Hill Guide to English Literature.

Review

"Lawrence provides an important interrogation of travel writing as a genre and travel as a formative concept in women's identity. Women's narrative wandering is, according to Lawrence, a 'risky' and 'rewardingly excessive' phenomenon (240), of which Penelope Voyages is both an analysis and an example."-Caroline Reitz, Brown University, Novel, Vol. 28, No. 3, Spring 1995

Long Description

Looking at travel writing by British women from the seventeenth century on, Karen R. Lawrence asks an intriguing question: What happens when, instead of waiting patiently for Odysseus, Penelope voyages and records her journey--when the woman who is expected to waitsets forth herself and traces an itinerary of her own? Lawrence ranges widely, discussing both fiction and nonfiction and traversing the genres of travel letters, realistic and sentimental novels, ethnography, fantasy, and postmodern narrative. In examining works as dissimilar as Margaret Cavendish's rendition of the Renaissance adventure narrative and Christine Brooke-Rose's postmodernist Between , she explores not only the significance of gender for travel writing, but also the value of travel itself for testing the limits of women's social freedoms and restraints. Lawrence shows how writings by Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sarah Lee, Mary Kingsley, Virginia Woolf, and Brigid Brophy reconceive the meanings of femininity in relation to such apparent oppositions as travel/home, other/self, and foreign/domestic. Despite the differences-historical, generic, political-among these writers, Lawrence maintains, they share common insights. Their accounts overturn the dichotomy between adventure and domesticity, demonstrating something illusory within both the stability of home and the freedom of travel.

Review Quote

"Lawrence provides an important interrogation of travel writing as a genre and travel as a formative concept in women's identity. Women's narrative wandering is, according to Lawrence, a 'risky' and 'rewardingly excessive' phenomenon (240), of which Penelope Voyages is both an analysis and an example."--Caroline Reitz, Brown University, Novel, Vol. 28, No. 3, Spring 1995

Details ISBN0801499135 Author Karen R. Lawrence Short Title PENELOPE VOYAGES Publisher Cornell University Press Series Reading Women Writing Language English ISBN-10 0801499135 ISBN-13 9780801499135 Media Book Format Paperback Year 1994 Imprint Cornell University Press Place of Publication Ithaca Country of Publication United States Illustrations Illustrations Pages 288 Residence UT, US Subtitle Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition DOI 10.1604/9780801499135 UK Release Date 1994-12-15 AU Release Date 1994-12-15 NZ Release Date 1994-12-15 US Release Date 1994-12-15 Publication Date 1994-12-15 Alternative 9780801426100 DEWEY 820.99287 Audience Undergraduate We've got this

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