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Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan narrates forgotten stories of cross-cultural friendship and love between Victorian female travellers and Meiji Japanese between 1853 and 1912.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: Hospitable Friendship: Victorian Women Travellers and the Praxis of Ethical Relationality
- 2: A Traveller Who Laughs: Isabella Bird and Unbeaten Tracks in Japan
- 3: A Literary Diplomat: Mary Crawford Fraser and A Diplomatist's Wife in Japan
- 4: A Scientist in Love: Marie Stopes and A Journal from Japan
About the author
Tomoe Kumojima is a lecturer at the CORE of STEM and the International Exchange Centre at Nara Women's University, Japan. Her current research project explores the concept of aesthetic diplomacy and its political efficacy through textual and visual analysis of travelogues, fictional writing, and artwork about the Asia-Pacific region by women in the British Empire, the United States, and the Empire of Japan in the early twentieth century.
Summary
Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan: Hospitable Friendship examines forgotten stories of cross-cultural friendship and intimacy between Victorian female travel writers and Meiji Japanese. Drawing on unpublished primary sources and contemporary Japanese literature hithero untranslated into English it highlights the open subjectivity and addective relationality of Isabella Bird, Mary Crawford Fraser, and Marie Stopes in their interactions with Japanese hosts.
Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan demonstates how travel narratives and literary works about non-colonial Japan complicate and challenge Oriental stereotypes and imperial binaries. It traces the shifts in the representation of Japan in Victorian discourse from obsequious mousmé to virile samurai alongside transitions in the Anglo-Japanese bilateral relationship and global geopolitical events. Considering the ethical and political implications of how Victorian women wrote about their Japanese friends, it examines how female travellers created counter discourses. It charts the unexplored terrain of female interracial and cross-cultural friendship and love in Victorian literature, emphasizing the agency of female travellers against the scholarly tendency to depoliticize their literary praxis. It also offers parallel narratives of three Meiji women in Britain - Tsuda Umeko, Yasui Tetsu, and Yosano Akiko -and transnational feminist alliance.
The book is a celebration of the political possibility of female friendship and literature, and a reminder of the ethical responsibility of representing racial and cultural others.
Additional text
Such work could enhance cross-cultural understanding, just as she says the work of these travelers did for their own audiences
