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The nationalist projects of the long nineteenth century in Europe sought to define and contain the national self by positing concepts of national character and incommensurable national difference. Scholarship on European nationalisms has shown that national identity is inherently gendered, as can be seen from the gendered division of the public and private spheres, the exclusion of women from nation-building projects, the gendered politics of culture and from gendered allegories of the nation itself. At the same time many 19th century European writers (both male and female) sought to destabilize the intrinsic gendering of their own cultural and political nationalisms. Moreover, the nineteenth century was witness to new and different transnational encounters thanks to factors such as urbanization, mass migration, imperialism, industrialization and the advent of leisure travel. This collection of essays, spanning the long nineteenth century from the revolutionary late-eighteenth century to the pre-WWI period in the twentieth century, explores the varied ways in which the transnational encounter contributed to or contested the gendered paradigm of nineteenth-century nationalisms. A number of essays look to debates and learned discussions that dwell on gender in a transnational context. When regarding gender roles in other nations, writers and philosophers used national differences in gender roles to achieve greater clarity in defining their own national virtues and traits. Other contributors to this volume focus on accounts of actual encounters in the form of travel writing, penned by both women and men. Travel writing thus provides opportunities to enact, critique and even transcend the gendered context of one's own national setting.
List of contents
Alison Lewis (The University of Melbourne): Introduction: Gender, Nation and the Transnational Encounter
Heather Merle Benbow (The University of Melbourne): Gender as an Intercultural Index in German-Speaking Europe
Jana Verhoeven (The University of Melbourne): Fashioning the French Male: Masculinity in the Trans-Channel Debate Over Manners and Morals
Timothy Verhoeven (Monash University): Captivity Tales: The Convent and True Womanhood in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Alison Lewis (The University of Melbourne): Ida Pfeiffer's Travel Writings about Madagascar's 'Cruel' Queen Ranavola I: 'Wicked Woman' or Proud Anti-colonialist?
Lara Anderson (The University of Melbourne): Transcending the Gendered Politics of Culture: Emilia Pardo Bazán's Fin-de-Siècle Travel Writing
Christiane Weller (Monash University): Male Pursuits: Travelling Adventurers in Australia and the Pacific
Jacqueline Dutton (The University of Melbourne): Marcelle Tinayre and the Dawn of Turkish Feminism: Notes d'une voyageuse en Turquie (1910)
Paul Bowker (Monash University): In Praise of the Melting Pot: Argentina as Transformative Space in the Travels of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
Colin Nettelbeck (The University of Melbourne): Blurred Borders of Sexuality and National Conscious-ness: The Metonymic Subtext of Gide's L'Immoraliste (1902)
About the author
Heather Merle Benbow is Senior Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Melbourne.
