British Women Travellers in Switzerland 1790-1820

My research focuses on the transnational construction of female alterity in the Swiss Alps, drawing on a corpus of five travel accounts and diaries written by British women between 1790 and 1820. By considering these authors’ landscape descriptions as a form of gendered, social, and political discourse, and by paying specific attention to their portrayal of regional daily life, clothing, and religious practices, ,my project explores how this female gaze challenges and subverts a traditionally male-gendered and elitist travel experience and its codified literary practices. Thus, my work seeks to demonstrate how these women travellers and the construction of a culture for the traveller’s gaze contributed to the crystallization and diffusion of a Swiss female identity.