Women Travelers in 19th Century Spain: Constructing an Alternative Imagology
Guest lecture by Alberto Egea Fernández-Montesinos. All interested are welcome to this seminar arranged by the Literature studies research area!
During the 19th century, numerous women writers arrived in Spain from Northern Europe and North America and dedicated a significant part of their leisure time to writing about various aspects of Spanish culture and life. The topic of the image of Spain and the construction of a national identity has been widely discussed in the last decades analyzing travelogues written by men. However, there has been very little interest in studying the perspectives found in accounts written by women. In addition, the trips and written outcomes by these women construct a very particular image of Spain, sometimes trying to escape from the clichés and stereotypes recurrent in the texts written by their male counterparts. The themes addressed in this presentation engage with various debates about representation and travel, culture and encounter, and hegemony and discourse, The recent field study of imagology and picturesque aesthetics, in line with key contributions by Stephen Copley, Joep Leerssen, and Manfred Beller, also serve to cast light in the study of the construction of alternative images of Spain.
Alberto Egea Fernández-Montesinos is associate professor of English literature at the Universidad Pablo Olavide in Sevilla (Spain). His research focuses on the social impact of the study of the image of nations in the development of their economies, specifically on the image of Spain in literary representations by American writers during the last two centuries.