Adeline BAREL (Université Clermont Auvergne – CELIS)
Mary Shelley’s “masculine and original” plea for the Italian unification in Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843: a transition from “politics of the heart” to “politics at heart” in women’s travel literature?
In his work Et In Arcadia Ego, historian Nicolas Bourguinat examines over 300 travel accounts in Italy, published by approximately 220 women who traveled or resided in the country between 1770 and 1870. During this period, an analogy emerged between the non-existence of Italy as a nation and the invisibility of women as citizens. Travel literature—a genre described as “open” and “free from laws” by Roland Le Huenen—became an increasingly popular tool throughout the 19th century for women with political opinions they cared to voice and defend.
However, crossing the boundaries between the private and public spheres was problematic at the time; women’s politically inclined writings were harshly criticized if not outright dismissed. In the early 19th century, authors like Charlotte Eaton, Lady Morgan, and Anna Jameson resorted to tropes associating Italy with representations of women as passive and vulnerable, inherited from the masculine conventions of 18th-century literature (E. Bohls). The analogy between women and Italy thus spread from the very limits imposed on publishing women in British society at the time.
A lesser-known work by Mary Shelley, the celebrated author of Frankenstein, Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843 was published in 1844. According to Bourguinat, it marked a literary shift in travel writing—from the objectivist and encyclopedic impersonal style of the Enlightenment to subjective and fragmented narratives offering glimpses into the experiences and personalities of travelers, male and female alike, as seen later in the works of authors like D.H. Lawrence or Vernon Lee.
In Rambles, Mary Shelley does not resort to rhetorics of binary opposition between masculine and feminine, neither in her position as a woman writing on a public topic nor in the way she depicts Italy as she advocates for its political future. Garnering the attention of fifteen literary critics, Rambles received predominantly positive reviews. An article in the New Monthly Magazine even highlighted the « masculine and original spirit » of the author, in contrast with the Observer’s harsh isolated critique, which was nevertheless still characteristic of the time in its assertion that “with her, as with all women, politics is a matter of the heart, and not, as with the more robust nature of man, of the head…” (my emphasis).
In any case, these critiques reveal that Rambles was received with a need to ponder and reassert the literary gender roles that Mary Shelley did not necessarily present as fitting within their usual boxes in this work. I would thus like to explore to what extent Mary Shelley, beyond conforming to either a masculine or feminine mode of writing, asserts a singularity in her writing of a political cause she holds at heart in Rambles, which can be seen as marking a transition in travel literature about Italian politics authored by female, and also perhaps male writers.
Kevin CRISTIN (Aix-Marseille Université) et Sara EL MAJHAD (Aix-Marseille Université)
Traveling Heroes and Traveling Forms: the Imperial Romance across Broders.
Il s’agira d’étudier des romances britanniques qui ont ensuite été adaptées par Hollywood. Nous nous concentrerons sur la figure du voyageur, telle qu’incarnée à la fois par l’auteur et par le protagoniste des romances impériales et de leur adaptation.
Abstract forthcoming.
Mathilde LA CASSAGNÈRE (Université Savoie Mont-Blanc)
Lost in mutation: becoming the alien in Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn.
To be captivated by the outside, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen (The Visible and the Invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty).
From its very title, Dawn (1987) launches its journey to the in-between. The novel features the last survivors of a nuclear war saved from a devasted Earth and brought aboard a sentient ship by the Oankali, highly advanced and yet a-technological nomadic extraterrestrials. Lilith, an African American woman, is chosen and co-opted by the tentacular aliens to mediate between them and the remaining humans to have the latter accept the former’s “trade,” otherwise both species are doomed: the Oankali are travelling the galaxies in search of other lifeforms with whom to merge sensuously in order to share genetic information and experience—whereby, the Oankali claim, the partners in trade shall not only avoid extinction, but also keep improving and being augmented. This precipitates a major crisis among the human survivors trapped in their binary frame of mind: is there more to lose or to gain from this ymbiogenesis? To resist, or to accept the metamorphosis? To love, or to hate the alien? No doubt, the eco-anxiety which inspired Butler at the time she wrote Dawn—the cold war was threatening to break out into a nuclear catastrophe—resonates our time’s ongoing conflicts between the tenants of an ecological transition and their opponents. But even more intriguing is the “metanamorphic” (so to speak) quality of Butler’s text which constantly—and inconclusively—shifts between utopia and dystopia, the future and the past, hard and soft sciences, and above all between alien and human point of view, as Lilith’s attraction-repulsion for the Medusan Oankali has her adopt a double focalisation—or is it the other way round? In Butler’s disturbing poetics of the hybrid, troubled perception takes us beyond our cognitive and sensory norms to explore a mode of being whose impalpable essence is transition, to envisage alternative forms of thought, experience, identity, beauty, gender, sex, and sensuality.
Samia OUNOUGHI (Université Grenoble Alpes – LIDILEM), Emmanuelle PERALDO (Université Côte d’Azur (CTELA) et Anne-Florence QUAIREAU (Université d’Angers – CIRPaLL)
Transitions épistémologiques : Le décentrement au cœur des études sur le récit de voyage
L’ouvrage collectif Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on British Travel Writing: Decentring Epistemologies (Routledge, 2025) réunit seize contributions qui portent sur des récits de voyages britanniques depuis le 18e siècle à nos jours. Le but de cette communication est de présenter le projet de recherche qui a conduit à cette publication. Ce projet s’articule autour de trois constats majeurs concernant le voyage, le récit de voyage et les études sur le récit de voyage. Au fil de l’histoire, les évolutions individuelles et sociétales ont progressivement modifié les motivations du voyage, les destinations, ainsi que les profils de voyageurs. Le regard autocentré de l’explorateur ou du colonisateur se tourne vers une rencontre de l’autre et de l’ailleurs qui s’inscrit dans une attention accrue à l’état de la planète et au vivant. En conséquence, le récit de voyage se transforme, se diversifie dans ses thématiques et dans sa poétique où se rejouent aussi les rapports entre fiction et référentialité, entre texte et paratexte, entre texte et images. Ainsi, les études du récit de voyage évoluent avec les objets épistémologiques qui sous-tendent la recherche dans ce champ. Un éventail de perspectives s’est ouvert accueillant des approches variées avec les études postcoloniales, géopoétiques, écocritiques, les études sur le fait alimentaire, sur les animaux ou encore sur la montagne. Il s’agira de montrer de quelle manière ces décentrements épistémologiques complexifiés par une riche intersectionnalité nourrissent notre champ de recherche et augurent de perspectives nombreuses qui annoncent de beaux projets à venir.
Anne ROUHETTE (Université Clermont Auvergne – CELIS)
The rhetoric of time and space in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Scandinavia (1792)
Travel writing follows spatial and chronological constraints: moving from one point to the next in one’s itinerary, how long it takes to reach one’s destination, etc. The rhetorical structure underlying other types of narratives, more or less based on logical considerations such as the shift from cause to consequence, usually plays little or no part in a travelogue. Transitions, understood in the sense of phrases or passages used to pass from one subject to another, i.e. of logical connectives, are often conspicuously absent from narratives in which fragments of various sorts — descriptive, historical, confessional… — seem to be juxtaposed. This paper proposes to look at other possible forms of transitions and the effect they produce in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Scandinavia (1792) in order to reflect on the specificities of writing in travel literature.