Great Women Travel Writers: From 1750 to the Present - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826418406 ISBN 13: 9780826418401

Publisher: Continuum, 2006

Synopsis

Travel can be sacred, an escape, and always enlightening. Women explorers and travelers are a special breed. Some were also incredible writers, recording their cross-cultural impressions with stunning vividness, often crossing into the most patriarchal cultures. The editors and a team of contemporary writers profile 22 courageous women who form a grand tradition. Among them, Lady Hester Stanhope (1776-1839), Fanny Lewald (1811-89), Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922), Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), Anaïs Nin (1903-77), Freya Stark (1893-1993), Ruth Gruber (1911- ), Oriana Fallaci (1930- ). "The writing styles flow well, and the book gives a highly readable introduction to some lesser-known female authors." - Library Journal "As a starting point for readers looking to explore the subject, the anthology will serve quite well." - Publishers Weekly.
Great Women Travel Writers is indexed in H.W. Wilson's Essay and General Literature Index.

About this title

About the Author:

Alba Amoia is the author of Twentieth-century Italian Women Writers, No Mothers We!, Albert Camus, Feodor Dostoevsky, and other works. She lives in Rome.BETTINA L. KNAPP is the author of over 50 books, including Anaïs Nin, Gertrude Stein, Antonin Artaud, French Fairy Tales: A Jungian Approach, and Women in Myth. She lives in New York City. Both editors have traveled the world, apart and together.

From Publishers Weekly:

This collection of 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century travel writing "probes the diaries, correspondences, creative works and studies left to posterity by a diverse group of frequently heroic women," albeit in thoroughly uninspired prose. Editors Amoia and Knapp, who also collaborated on the biographical sourcebook Multicultural Writers from Antiquity to 1945, introduce readers to wanderers like Friederike Brun, a German author who spent so much time in Denmark that she once commented, "To which people I actually belong, I really don't know." The book devotes chapters to the lives and careers of novelists (and travelers) Edith Wharton and Anaïs Nin. It also includes sections on Oriana Fallaci-an Italian journalist who "relentlessly recorded the suffering of soldiers and civilians alike in Vietnam, Lebanon, Greece, Palestine, Argentina and the Persian Gulf area"-and on Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, the first Russian woman to journey into space. Despite the pioneering subject matter, however, most of the 22 essays in the collection are as compelling as an airport layover. Overall, the pieces tend to be dry, factual and marked by overly abstract interpretations (c.f., "It will be my contention that the multiplicity of selves that Nin displayed in her cross-cultural and bicoastal lives is characteristic of the shape shifting that shamans perform"). As a starting point for readers looking to explore the subject, the anthology will serve quite well, but ordinary armchair travelers will probably prefer to catch another flight.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Continuum
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0826418406
• ISBN 13: 9780826418401
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Amoia Alba, Knapp Bettina