ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the intersection of self, writing, and Otherness in three travel narratives by early twentieth-century British and American women, investigating how the woman traveler constructs her body next to her perception of the other in narrative and photograph, and how she sees herself affected by the encounter. It also examines Grace Thompson Seton's A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt, an unusual text which collapses the boundaries between fact and fantasy, external and internal voyage. The chapter explores increasingly "imaginative geographies," showing a progression from corporeal study to inward exploration. It is concerned with the movement of travel literature into modernism with the stream-of-consciousness style of Vita Sackville-West's Passenger to Teheran, connect to Virginia Woolf's writing. In Nettie Fowler Dietz's A White Woman in a Black Man's Country, a more traditional African travel narrative which contains descriptions and photographs of native peoples, the African body becomes the focal point for the Western reader's escapist desires.
