Utopian Visions and Gender Imaginaries in Nineteenth-Century Travel Literature on the 'Orient'

Non-fictional travel literature of the nineteenth century share with utopian writings political and poetical concerns most often connected to colonialism, collective identity, and cultural difference through the representation of gender and ‘race’. One of the major issues raised in both travel and utopian literature is the complex relationship between identity and otherness in the construction (and deconstruction) of personal and collective identity where the relationship between the country of origin and the ‘Orient’ might represent a projection of repressed desire and fears as well as an expression of cultural and political ideologies, and a reinforcement of the traveller’s subject position. More recent critical theories on travel literature have started to foreground the covert presence of the subversive perspective of the other in literary texts, thanks to the critical support of postcolonial criticism, women’s and gender studies. Travel literature, in its intertwining with utopian writings, underscores non univocal movements towards assimilation of the other into the self, but it also connotes the ‘other’ as a powerful element of displacement and/or awareness and change. A comparison between male and female travel writings shows how the ‘Orient’ represents a critical terrain that highlights a cultural difference between man and women travellers and unveils their diverse subject positions in the social order.