ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book analyzes the travel narratives in light of travel-writing criticism, discourse on colonial and postcolonial literature, feminist literary criticism, Foucauldian theories, and Aristotelian rhetoric to better understand how the three women authors articulated competing discourses. It combines two subject areas that resist static meanings and overarching classifications. The three traveling women authors considered in this book, Florence Dixie, Eduarda Mansilla, and Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz, are upper class, which gave them advantages of privilege but did not make their travels any easier. Arguments in the book show that an inferior status should not be attributed to the genre of travel narratives, because authors are constantly reinventing ways to express cultural clashes at the level of discourse through elaborate rhetoric. The book explains some of the tainted paradigms that often haunt women's travel narratives.
