Victorian Women Travellers in Meiji Japan: Discovering a 'New' Land (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781905246731)

This volume complements other published works about travel by nineteenth-century women writers by locating and creating 'space' for Japan which is missing within recent critical discourses on travel writing. It examines the narratives of women writers who travelled to Japan from the mid-1850s onwards, when Japan was first opened to the West, and became a highly desirable travel destination for decades thereafter. Many women travelled in this period, and although most left no record of their journeys, enough did to form a discrete body of literature spanning more than fifty years - from the end of the feudal Tokugawa era to the rise of Meiji Japan as a world power. Their narratives about Japan occupy a culturally significant place, not only in the genre of Victorian female travel writing, but in Victorian travel writing per se. The writers who are the subject of this book are divided into two groups: those who were 'travellers-by-intent', namely, Anna D'A, Alice Frere, Annie Brassey, Isabella Bird and Marie Stopes, and those who 'travelled-by-default' as the wives of diplomats, namely Mrs Pemberton Hodgson, Mrs Hugh Fraser and Baroness Albert d'Anethan.

Author: Lorraine Sterry
ISBN-10: 1905246730
ISBN-13: 9781905246731
Publisher: Brill
Language: English
Published: 01/29/2009
Pages: 328
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.60w x 1.20d