Gender, Companionship, and Travel : Discourses in Pre-modern and Modern Travel Literature

This book explores companionship in travel writing in pre-modern and modern times. It features women as travellers from all parts of the world, with varied travel patterns and behaviours. It documents their stories against the backdrop of companionship, or the absence of it. The book reveals that from antiquity onwards traveling together has always been a structural part of women’s and men’s social lives, cultures and worldviews.

Over the last couple of decades there has been a strong academic interest in how individuals interact with each other while en route. Yet, even if various studies have informed us about present-day realities of travel companionships, we know little about the influence of gender both on these realities, as well as on the discourse in which these are being narrated.

This book aims to establish an agenda for the study of companionship in travel writing by offering a collection of new essays which study texts that belong to the broad category of pre-modern and modern travel literature. Chapters explore the differences and similarities in the ways that women and men in the past chose to describe their experiences with, and/or their ideas about companionship, and specifically reveals the influence of gender norms, conventions, restrictions, and stereotypes.

This is the first book which looks at the long-term, interdisciplinary, and genuinely international history of gendered discourses on companionship in travel writing. It will be of interest to scholars and students from a wide variety of disciplines, including cultural and social history, as well as cultural, literary, gender, travel, and tourism studies.