This course focuses on writing by women travelers between East and West from the seventeenth
century to the nineteenth century. We will begin with the first secular travel narrative by an
Englishwoman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who lived in Istanbul and traveled through
Ottoman territories during the early eighteenth century. Later in the eighteenth century, the
lower-class Elizabeth Marsh was held in Morocco, traveling as far as the royal court in
Marrakesh. She subsequently published the first Englishwoman’s “Barbary” captivity narrative.
Lady Elizabeth Craven’s account of her journey from “Crimea to Constantinople,” which
responds to previous travel narratives (including Montagu’s), closes off the eighteenth century.
Shifting from the era of Ottoman hegemony to the growing dominance of Western Europeans
(particularly the British and French) in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, we
will examine narratives by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Turkish and English feminists
who literally and figuratively traversed the East/West divide. These include Grace Ellison and
Halide Edib, among others. Investigating these women’s travel narratives over the longue durée
raises questions about continuity and difference in the representations of gender and orientalism,
which we will engage through a dialogic “inter-imperial” approach.