From Claiming Authority to Sensuous Excursions: Mapping the Female Body in Latvian Women’s Travel Writing (1878–1920)
From Claiming Authority to Sensuous Excursions: Mapping the Female Body in Latvian Women’s Travel Writing (1878–1920)

Summary/Abstract: Although Latvian women started to publish their travel writings during the 1870s, until recently they have not attracted much scholarly attention. Thus the aim of this article is twofold: first, by focusing on Latvian women’s travel writing published in the last decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries, to expand the knowledge of women’s contributions to the genre and to the history of literature in general; and second, by concentrating on the female body, to analyze how women construct narratives about themselves as embodied travelling subjects. Based on the ideas of feminine writing (écriture féminine) and the insight that travel writing is one of the most physical of literary genres because it thematically involves the body moving through space, the travelogues of Minna Freimane (Par piemiņu, 1884) and Angelika Gailīte (Vērojumi un sapņojumi, 1920) are read in order to trace the changes in the representation of the female traveller’s body.

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