Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility 1784-1814 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)
Cambridge University Press, 4/30/2017
EAN 9781107182233, ISBN10: 1107182239
Hardcover, 306 pages, 23.5 x 16 x 2 cm
Language: English
In the last days of the Scandinavian journey that would become the basis of her great post-Revolutionary travel book, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, 'I am weary of travelling - yet seem to have no home - no resting place to look to - I am strangely cast off'. From this starting point, Ingrid Horrocks reveals the significance of representations of women wanderers in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, particularly in the work of women writers. She follows gendered, frequently reluctant wanderers beyond travel narratives into poetry, gothic romances, and sentimental novels, and places them within a long history of uses of the more traditional literary figure of the male wanderer. Drawing out the relationship between mobility and affect, and illuminating textual forms of wandering, Horrocks shows how paying attention to the figure of the woman wanderer sheds new light on women and travel, and alters assumptions about mobility's connection with freedom.
Introduction
reluctant wanderers
1. 'Circling eye' to 'houseless stranger'
the shifting landscape of the long poem
2. The desolations of wandering
Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets
3. 'The irresistible force of circumstances'
the poetics of wandering in Radcliffean Gothic
4. 'Take, o world! thy much indebted tear!'
Mary Wollstonecraft travels
5. 'No motive of choice'
Frances Burney and the wandering novel
Coda
'He could afford to suffer'
losses and gains.