Poétique du genre et représentation de l'autre dans les récits de femmes voyageuses au XIXe siècle

Abstract

The travel literature genre that was published and greatly developed during the 19th century was mainly the workings of men. Nonetheless, after 1850, when the mobility of women gained weight, the arrival of women writers to travel literature, and the surge of women that travelled, became apparent and more significant in connection to this genre. On analysing a corpus of narrative texts related to women travellers of French expression, this paper looks at the approximation and distancing of the genre, primarily defined by the male writer, in the hope of finding a feminine specificity. It also seeks out representations of otherness drawn up by these types of narratives.