Victorian Women's Travel Writing and the Female-Capitalist Gaze

Narrating Commerce, Craftsmanship, and Nationhood in the Middle East and Asia
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-041-11519-9
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 224 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature

Victorian Women's Travel Writing and the Female-Capitalist Gaze argues that female travellers both informed and expanded upon Victorian debates surrounding the role of art, and art production, as a nexus of political-economic progress and cultural identity. The book focuses on reading Victorian women’s travel narratives as applied political-economic theory. Drawing on histories of women's involvement as organisers, vendors, and shoppers in British bazaars and ‘Oriental’ department stores, the book examines how female Victorian travellers’ use their narratives of shopping and browsing in Eastern markets, museums, and manufactories to grapple with their preconceived notions of the ‘Orient’, and interrogate the dominant perception that capitalist development was a universal and linear trajectory. This research asserts that Victorian women’s travel writing made vital contributions to the development of ‘classical’ political-economic thought by representing the state of Eastern commerce and craftsmanship through a ‘female-capitalist gaze’ which performs a comparative evaluation of Western and Eastern trade practices; and also performs a revision of postcolonial literary theory that frames geo-political relationships between Britain, Egypt, Persia, China, and Japan through a historically accurate model of comparative social and political ‘progress’ that existed simultaneously, but not synonymously, with models based on the ‘natural history’ of human development. This book is primarily for scholars or postgraduate students of British literature and the histories of art, economics, and empire in the nineteenth century. It would also be of interest for curators and researchers working in the museum and heritage sectors.

Zielgruppe

Academic

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gray, Margaret K.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: An Inquiry into Victorian Women’s Travel Writing and Classical Political-Economic Thought

1. A Bazaar Business: Women’s Commercial Agency and the Oriental Marketplace

2. The Exhibitionary Narrative: Visual Rhetorics of Economics and Ethnography

3. Supply on Demand? Forging Economic Futures in the Global Antiquities Market

4. The Looming Empire: Industry, Aesthetics, and Political Economy in the Global Textile Trade

Über Autor(innen)

Margaret Gray is an early-career researcher based in Oxford, UK. She earned her PhD in English Literature at Newcastle University in 2024; her body of work focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to Victorian literature and aesthetic culture. She has published articles on Victorian women travellers as collectors of Japanese art and Buddhist approaches to Victorian aesthetics. In addition to academic teaching and research, she has worked as an archivist, curatorial assistant, and writer for UK institutions including Newcastle University, the Bodleian Library (Oxford), and UNESCO Blue Shield.