School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemGendered Mobility, Cosmopolitanism, and Western Women's Writing on China, 1895-1937( 2021)In much early-twentieth-century Anglophone writing, the imagining of China see-sawed between high Modernist Chinoiserie and the Yellow Peril. This thesis looks elsewhere for a different China, one which is found in the overlooked, non-canonical works of women travellers to and residents in China, published between 1895 and 1937. It examines the writings of both well-known and under-studied authors: Isabella Bird, Mary Gaunt, Emily Georgiana Kemp, Dorothea Hosie, and Florence Ayscough, in order to reconsider the complex relationship of gender, mobility, affect, and cosmopolitanism. Foregrounding elements of disorderly mobility and affective sociability, I explore how movement and transcultural encounters are gendered, embodied, and configured through relationships with Chinese people, places, objects, landscape, language and literature. In the process, I show how these very different women found themselves adopting creative approaches to the contested relations between self and other, home and abroad, root and route, tradition and modernity, configuring various forms of gendered cosmopolitanism. In addressing the ongoing re-examination of women writers’ contribution to the intellectual, literary, and cultural history, this thesis shows how a better, fuller understanding of women’s mobility demands new ways of appreciating the history of women’s lives as well as the history of West/East cultural exchanges.