Between cultures: Travel writing, identity, and the global novel

Buchaillard, Sophie 2023. Between cultures: Travel writing, identity, and the global novel. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This thesis consists of a work of experimental writing and a critical commentary. Drawing on practice-led research, it studies the exclusionary nature of travel writing with regards to women and migrants and destabilises certain ideas about genre, informed by outdated and restrictive perceptions of identity and who gets to write about travel, which perpetuate exclusionary realities. The novel explores the relationship between the genre1 of travel writing and how we articulate our own identity2 , through three generations of women’s travels. Travels here refers to ‘the written account of such journeys’3 in spatial, temporal, and metaphorical terms, glimpsing at internal journeys and changing perceptions about identity, through the stories we retain and the ones we choose to forget. A physical journey also, across multiple countries; over a period that ranges from the colonial era to the not-to-distant future. A metaphorical journey finally, which explores the result of the confrontation between the subjective experience of migration (documented as travel writing) and the imagined sense of identity (inherited from curated memories through history, literature and family myths.) The result is a collection of fragmented texts which mirror the gradual dissolution of a linear and chronological perception of who we are in favour of a re-articulation of self in relation to the present experience alone.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	8 November 2023
Last Modified:	24 Nov 2023 11:01
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/163727

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