Other encounters: European writers and gender in transnational context

The nationalist projects of the long nineteenth century in Europe sought to define and contain the national self by positing concepts of national character and incommensurable national difference. Scholarship on European nationalisms has shown that national identity is inherently gendered, as can be seen from the gendered division of the public and private spheres, the exclusion of women from nation-building projects, the gendered politics of culture and from gendered allegories of the nation itself. At the same time many 19th century European writers (both male and female) sought to destabilize the intrinsic gendering of their own cultural and political nationalisms. Moreover, the nineteenth century was witness to new and different transnational encounters thanks to factors such as urbanization, mass migration, imperialism, industrialization and the advent of leisure travel. This collection of essays, spanning the long nineteenth century from the revolutionary late-eighteenth century to the pre-WWI period in the twentieth century, explores the varied ways in which the transnational encounter contributed to or contested the gendered paradigm of nineteenth-century nationalisms. A number of essays look to debates and learned discussions that dwell on gender in a transnational context. When regarding gender roles in other nations, writers and philosophers used national differences in gender roles to achieve greater clarity in defining their own national virtues and traits. Other contributors to this volume focus on accounts of actual encounters in the form of travel writing, penned by both women and men. Travel writing thus provides opportunities to enact, critique and even transcend the gendered context of one’s own national setting.