Self territories: landscape, identity and gender in travel literature: XIX / XX centuries

Abstract

This project intends to deal with the travel experience of six authors between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Maria Graham (1785-1842), James Holman (1786-1857), Flora Tristan (1803-1844), Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), Aurora Bertrana (1892-1974) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009). My hypothesis is that through travel and their narratives travelers can recompose their biography and overcome negative aspects and disadvantages such as gender, disability, social origin, illegitimacy or ethnic origin. The travel allows a displacement in relation to a social environment in which the characteristics, origin or way of life of these authors were problematic, allowing them to become authors in search of literary and / or scientific recognition, specialists in a certain matter or space, to from an experience acquired in the journey, producing narratives of themselves that explain, justify and divulge exceptional lives. To do so, I intend to analyze his narratives as autobiographical narratives that make up a very specific form of autobiography, a narrative of himself that depends on the experience of displacement, the appreciation of space and the landscape and otherness.