By “Northern Europe” we mean all the regions bordering the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, from the United Kingdom to northwest Russia, plus Iceland. The aim of the conference will be to study texts by women writers (in the broad sense of people who have produced written works) travelling in this part of the world during the “long nineteenth century”, to use Eric Hobsbawm’s expression. We have defined this period as beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) and ending with Mme Deblangy’s Croisière au cap Nord, voyage en Suède, Norvège, Danemark, à travers le centre de l’Europe (1911).
We are aiming for a cross-disciplinary conference. Specialists in comparative literature, European national literatures, economic and cultural history, travel literature, gender studies, art history, the relationship between text and image, and sociology are all invited to submit papers.