Women Writing Greece: Essays on Hellenism, Orientalism and Travel. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Women Writing Greece explores images of modern Greece by women who experienced the country as travellers, writers, and scholars, or who journeyed there through the imagination. The essays assembled here consider women's travel narratives, memoirs and novels, ranging from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century, focusing on the role of gender in travel and cross-cultural mediation and challenging stereotypical views of 'the Greek journey', traditionally seen as an antiquarian or Byronic pursuit. This collection aims to cast new light on women's participation in the discourses of Hellenism and Orientalism, examining their ideological rendering of Greece as at once a luminous land and a site crossed by contradictory cultural memories. Arranged chronologically, the essays discuss encounters with Greece by, among others, Lady Elizabeth Craven, Lady Hester Stanhope, Lady Montagu, Lady Morgan, Mary Shelley, Felicia Skene, Emily Pfeiffer, Eva Palmer, Jane Ellen Harrison, Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, Christa Wolf, Penelope Storace and Gillian Bouras, and analyse them through a variety of critical, historical, contextual and theoretical frames. Vassiliki Kolocotroni is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Efterpi Mitsi is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of English Studies of the University of Athens. Contents......Page 8 Introduction......Page 10 Lady Elizabeth Craven’s Letters from Athens and the Female Picturesque......Page 24 Travels Off-centre: Lady Hester Stanhope in Greece......Page 44 A Gendered Vision of Greekness: Lady Morgan’s Woman: Or Ida of Athens......Page 60 Real Selves and Fictional Nobodies: Women’s Travel Writing and the Production of Identities......Page 82 The Sculpture and the Harem: Ethnography in Felicia Skene’s Wayfaring Sketches......Page 102 ‘A world without woman in any true sense’: Gender and Hellenism in Emily Pfeiffer’s......Page 118 British Women Travellers to Greece, 1880-1930......Page 140 Eva Palmer’s Distinctive Greek Journey......Page 164 ‘No Place Like Home’: Gillian Bouras and the ‘Others’......Page 190 Going Back to the Mother: Postcolonial Inscriptions and Migrant Tales......Page 216 The Greek Ideal in Patricia Storace’s Dinner with Persephone and Christa Wolf’s Cassandra......Page 230 Contributors......Page 252 Index......Page 256