By

Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0415096642    
Release Date: 1993-04-08

List Price: USD 37.95     Paperback

Buy it from:   amazon.com (from US$ 36.2)

How did women write in the colonial period? Is there a specifically female genre of travel writing?

Discourses of Difference unravels the complexities of writings by British women travellers of the "high colonial" period. Sara Mills' broad-based study draws on the work of Foucault and the ideas of colonialism of such cultural theorists as Edward Said, Louise Pratt, and Gayatri Spivak to produce a new thoeretical framework for the analysis of texts written during this period.

Mills argues that critics have paid insufficient attention to issues of gender, and have failed to consider the context in which texts by women were written and received. Through case studies of three women travellers--Alexandra David-Neel, Mary Kingsley and Nina Mazuchelli--Mills charts both the variety and the shared features in women's travel writing, suggesting that, although these women wrote from within the colonial system, they produced alternative accounts of the imperial presence in colonial countries.</P>

"Discourses of Difference" and "different discourses"	from Dun Wang

1 out of 1 found this helpful:

"DIscourses of Difference" and "different discourses"

Dun Wang(Albany)   

I think either way works for this kind of gender or colonial studies. This Sara Mills book is definitely wonderful. When I have time, I will read it.

The book description and the content outline remind me of another female author, Mary Louise Pratt, and her delineation of the "contact zone," which is "social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination."*

Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992),4.

2007-07-05 12:16   |    comment   

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Dun Wang (Albany)	urlicht (Kaohsiung)

2 people have read it

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