Kristi Siegel – författare

Women experience and portray travel differently: Gender matters – irreducibly and complexly. Building on recent scholarship in women’s travel writing, these provocative essays not only affirm the impact of gender, but also cast women’s journeys against coordinates such as race, class, culture, religion, economics, politics, and history. The book’s scope is unique: Women travelers extend in time from Victorian memsahibs to contemporary «road girls», and topics range from Anna Leonowens’s slanted portrayal of Siam – later popularized in the movie, The King and I, to current feminist «descripting» of the male-road-buddy genre. The extensive array of writers examined includes Nancy Prince, Frances Trollope, Cameron Tuttle, Lady Mary Montagu, Catherine Oddie, Kate Karko, Frances Calderón de la Barca, Rosamond Lawrence, Zilpha Elaw, Alexandra David-Néel, Amelia Edwards, Erica Lopez, Paule Marshall, Bharati Mukherjee, and Marilynne Robinson.

Fast Cars and Bad Girls: Nomadic Subjects and Women’s Road Stories explores the road narratives of women and the various ways their work re-maps American space. Moving from Mary Rowlandson’s famous captivity narrative to the frontier texts of the American West to the postapocalyptic novels of postmodern experience, Fast Cars and Bad Girls interrogates the intersections of nomadic theory and contemporary feminism. What would happen, the text queries the reader, if Jack Kerouac had gone on the road with a baby in the back seat? Women’s road texts are different, insists author Deborah Paes de Barros; notions such as resistance to the West, the revision of the natural world, mother-daughter relationships, avant-garde angst, and feminist utopias construct this discussion of women travel writers.

From the postcolonial perspective of the early twenty-first century, the importance of travel literature, for considerations of national and international cultures and identities, has become increasingly apparent. Travel literature in French has, however, received little critical scrutiny. This book contributes to contemporary reassessments of the form in a number of disciplines, focusing specifically on the discourses and contexts of travel in twentieth-century texts written in French. Its scope is interdisciplinary, involving theoretical and generic considerations as well as a historical overview of colonial and postcolonial texts. The book provides essential reading for all students of travel literature in French – and of travel literature in general.

Using an approach that links feminist, psychoanalytic, and cultural theory, Dr. Siegel examines how the figure of the mother becomes a site of textual turbulence in women's autobiography as well as an underexamined metaphor in modern culture and feminism. Women's Autobiographies, Culture, Feminism analyzes writings from a wide array of authors including Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Dillard, Maya Angelou, Zora Neale Hurston, Erna Bombeck, Betty MacDonald, Maxine Hong Kingston, Alta, Nancy Mairs, Anne Rolphe, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous.

The increased attention now devoted to studying travel writing and theory follows on the heels of a growing critical interest in autobiography (a genre closely aligned to travel writing); commentary on multiculturalism, nationalism, colonialism, and post-colonialism; and in spectacle and visual culture. The essays collected here address these diverse impulses and focus provocatively on issues of colonialism/post-colonialism, empire, identity, culture, spectacle, pilgrimage, map theory, narrative theory, diaspora, and displacement, and discuss writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Roosevelt, Jean Baudrillard, Alexis de Tocqueville, Simone de Beauvoir, V. S. Naipaul, Evelyn Waugh, John McPhee, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Walter Benjamin, Constance Fredericka Gordon Cumming, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Bowen, Kurt Vonnegut, Dorothy Richardson, Jonathan Raban, Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin, and Doris Lessing.