ABSTRACT
This book is concerned with the analysis of women’s travel writing in the period of what James Morris calls ‘high imperialism’, roughly demarcated here as the mid-nineteenth century to early twentieth century. (Morris, 1979c: 23). In this period, a new colonial relationship emerged, where formal conquest, annexation and administration became the most common relation between Britain and certain other countries, and Britain declared itself to be an imperial nation (Hobsbawm, 1987). I will be concentrating mainly on the writings of British women travel writers who describe their travels to colonised countries, which I am taking to mean broadly those countries which were under British economic, religious or political control, however loosely that may be defined.1 Rather than viewing colonialism as a unified phenomenon, I concentrate on the differences of discursive frameworks which the changes in the colonial situation entailed. Critics such as Peter Hulme and Dennis Porter have analysed the heterogeneity in discourse structures within the colonial period, but they have not considered the way that women writers had to negotiate different textual constraints (Hulme, 1986; D.Porter, 1982).
