Political Affairs of the Heart

Female Travel Writers, the Sentimental Travelogue, and Revolution, 1775-1800
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68448-406-5
Verlag: Bucknell University Press

Buch, Englisch, 238 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 163 mm x 254 mm, Gewicht: 408 g

Reihe: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture 1650-1850

Richly researched and engagingly written, Political Affairs of the Heart traces the emergence of female sentimental travel writing in late eighteenth-century Britain, and posits its centrality to women’s engagement with national and gender politics. This study examines four travel narratives written by women between 1774 and 1795, convincingly arguing that they effectively deploy the discourse of sensibility to engage with debates around Britain’s national identity during the French and American Revolutions. Van Netten Blimke contends that Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768)—which first introduced sentimental discourse to the travelogue—facilitated women’s gradual inclusion into this previously male-dominated genre, effectively paving the way for women to influence the country’s sociopolitical transformation. These four previously understudied works successfully combine eyewitness authority with the language of sensibility to mount impassioned interventions in their nation’s perception and practice of revolutionary politics, at a time when its national identity was most in flux.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Netten Blimke, Linda van

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Über Autor(innen)

LINDA VAN NETTEN BLIMKE is an associate professor of English at Concordia University of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, where she teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. She is the coeditor of Crossing Canada, 1907: Hope Hook’s Diary.