Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843

Description

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.   Cover Series Page Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Introduction: 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 Sibylla 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’s Hartly House \ Kathleen Morrissey Afterword \ Eve Tavor Bannet Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index