ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that women's travel writing paralleled, even inspired, fundamental ideas of modernist literature. It examines a number of travel narratives written by British and American women, working with Edward Said's term "imaginative geography" to emphasize how the preconceptions a traveler brings to a country shape her representations. The book focuses on the skin as a vehicle for personal redefinition and entry into new cultural spaces. It also examines the connections both between illness and geographic space and between illness and the female body. It explores several autobiographically enriched works articulating experiences of travel written by three pregnant transnational women modernists. The book also explores the outward and introspective journeys in these literary forms to demonstrate how women's travel experiences and writings produced fundamental practices of modernism.
