" Western Women and Imperialism] provides fascinating insights into interactions and attitudes between western and non-western women, mainly in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is an important contribution to the field of women's studies and (primarily British) imperial history, in that many of the essays explore problems of cross-cultural interaction that have been heretofore ignored." --Nancy Fix Anderson "A challenging anthology in which a multiplicity of authors sheds new light on the waves of missionaries, 'memsahibs, ' nurses--and feminists." --Ms. "... a long-overdue engagement with colonial discourse and feminism.... excellent essays..." --The Year's Work in Critical Cultural Theory

This A-Z reference work provides the first comprehensive reference guide to the wide range of historical writing with which women have been involved, particularly since the Renaissance. The Companion covers biographical writing, travelogue and historical fictions, broadening the concept of history to include the forms of writing with which women have historically engaged. The focus is on women writing in English internationally, but historical and historiographical traditions from beyond the English-speaking world are also examined. Brief biographies of individual writers are included.

Includes the Proceedings of the Royal geographical society, formerly pub. separately.

Positioned at a crossroads between feminist geographies and modernist studies, Excursions into Modernism considers transnational modernist fiction in tandem with more rarely explored travel narratives by women of the period who felt increasingly free to journey abroad and redefine themselves through travel. In an era when Western artists, writers, and musicians sought 'primitive' ideas for artistic renewal, Joyce E. Kelley locates a key similarity between fiction and travel writing in the way women authors use foreign experiences to inspire innovations with written expression and self-articulation. She focuses on the pairing of outward journeys with more inward, introspective ones made possible through reconceptualizing and mobilizing elements of women’s traditional corporeal and domestic geographies: the skin, the ill body, the womb, and the piano. In texts ranging from Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark to Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and from Evelyn Scott’s Escapade to Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, Kelley explores how interactions between geographic movement, identity formation, and imaginative excursions produce modernist experimentation. Drawing on fascinating supplementary and archival materials such as letters, diaries, newspaper articles, photographs, and unpublished drafts, Kelley’s book cuts across national and geographic borders to offer rich and often revisionary interpretations of both canonical and lesser-known works.