Discourses of Difference: Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism Book

Discourses of Difference unravels the complexities of writings by British women travellers of the ``high colonial'' period. Sara Mills' broad-based study draws on the work of Foucault and the ideas of colonialism of such cultural theorists as Edward Said, Louise Pratt, and Gayatri Spivak to produce a new theoretical framework for the analysis of texts written during this period.Mills argues that critics have paid insufficient attention to issues of gender, and have failed to consider the context in which texts by women were written and received. Through case studies of three women travellers--Alexandra David Neel, Mary Kingsly, and Nina Mazuchelli--she charts both the variety and the shared features in women's travel writing, suggesting that, although these women wrote from within the colonial system, they produced alternative accounts of the imperial presence in colonized countries.Read More