Yaël Schlick - Feminism and the Politics of Travel After the Enlightenment

Feminism and the Politics of Travel After the Enlightenment

Transits: Literature, thought & culture

Series Editor

Greg Clingham

Bucknell University

Transits is the next horizon. The series of books, essays and monographs aims to extend recent achievements in eighteenth century studies, and to publish work on any aspects of the literature, thought and culture of the years 16501850. Without ideological or methodological restrictions, Transits seeks to provide transformative readings of the literary, cultural, and historical interconnections between Britain, Europe, the Far East, Oceania, and the Americas in the long eighteenth century, and as they extend down to present time. In addition to literature and history, such global perspectives might entail considerations of time, space, nature, economics, politics, environment, and material culture, and might necessitate the development of new modes of critical imagination, which we welcome. But the series does not thereby repudiate the local and the national for original new work on particular writers and readers in particular places in time continues to be the bedrock of the discipline.

Titles in the Series

Figures of Memory: From the Muses to Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics

Zsolt Komromy

Horace Walpoles Letters: Masculinity and Friendship in the Eighteenth Century

George E. Haggerty

Thomas Sheridans Career and Influence: An Actor in Earnest

Conrad Brunstrm

The Self as Muse: Narcissism and Creativity in the German Imagination 17501830

Alexander Maths

Tobias Smollett in the Enlightenment: Travels through France, Italy, and Scotland

Richard J. Jones

Modern Antiques: The Material Past in England, 16601780

Barrett Kalter

A Race of Female Patriots: Women and Public Spirit on the British Stage, 16881745

Brett D. Wilson

The Family, Marriage, and Radicalism in British Womens Novels of the 1790s: Public Affection and Private Affliction

Jennifer Golightly

Feminism and the Politics of Travel After the Enlightenment

Yal Schlick

Transits

Feminism and the Politics of Travel After the Enlightenment

Yal Schlick

LEWISBURG

BUCKNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Published by Bucknell University Press

Co-published with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowmanlittlefield.com

Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom

Copyright 2012 by Yal Schlick

Chapter 4 previously published. Yal Rachel Schlick, Travel as Praxis: Suzanne Voilquin and the Saint Simonian Call to the Woman, European Romantic Review . December 2010, 21: 6, pages 693710. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd.

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schlick, Yal Rachel, 1963

Feminism and the politics of travel after the Enlightenment / Yal Schlick.

p. cm.(Transits)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61148-428-1 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-1-61148-429-8 (electronic)

1. Women travelersHistory. 2. Travelers writingsHistory. 3. Feminist literatureHistory. I. Title.

G460.S343 2012

910.4082'09032dc23 2011042161

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Dedicated with love to my mother and my father, Salomeia and Haim Schlick

travelers by necessity, and for pleasure.

More than anyone, they taught me the magic and value of travel.

And even today, whether we know it or not, the question of politics and the fact that man is a being endowed with the gift of action must always be present to our mind when we speak of the problem of freedom; for action and politics, among all the capabilities and potentialities of human life, are the only things of which we could not even conceive without at least assuming that freedom exists, and we can hardly touch a single political issue without, implicitly or explicitly, touching upon an issue of mans liberty. Freedom, moreover, is not only one among the many problems and phenomena of the political realm properly speaking, such as justice, or power, or equality; freedom, which only seldomin times of crisis or revolutionbecomes the direct aim of political action, is actually the reason that men live together in political organization at all. Without it, political life as such would be meaningless. The raison dtre of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action.

Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future