Discursive identities in English historical texts

As a result of transportation development and socio-economic changes, 19th century upper middle class British women began travelling and discovering many countries of the British Empire of which they provided accounts. The objective of this study is to bring to the fore the recurring lexical features used in authentic non-literary Victorian women’s travel writings forming a corpus. This was especially compiled, by downloading digitalised texts available in dedicated sites with the purpose of analysing the relatively most frequent key words and clusters used to construe discursive social identities while interacting with different social groups encountered in India. The methodology adopted is a mixed one. It integrates a corpus assisted approach with discourse analysis of the emerging data. The results suggest Victorian women travellers used discourse not only to construe distinct social identities linked to their awareness of England’s role in India, and to demarcate their identity from the ‘other’ but also to highlight hybrid identities in the colonial socio-cultural context.