ABSTRACT
This chapter disentangles the complex relationships between temporality and topography in Harriet Martineau’s and Fredrika Bremer’s travel narratives of Palestine and examines differences in the resulting views on the nation. The landscape in Martineau’s account served several different functions for exploring temporality, first and foremost as an opportunity to develop an imagined, close relationship to the historical person Jesus by sharing the same sensory perceptions. The relationship between topography and temporality is quite differently envisioned in Bremer’s travel narrative of Palestine in Life in the Old World. Bremer and Martineau shared the Protestant ambivalence in regard to pilgrimage. The kind of temporality underpinning Bremer’s allegorical geography is a Christian notion of time, defined by the concept kairos – eternity breaking into temporality, most notably with the advent of Christ. Bremer and Martineau shared the view that Christianity was superior to other religious beliefs based on the notion that Christianity aspired to universality.
