Victorian womens' travel journals and the "Other". A corpus linguistics analysis

Britain experienced a rapid technological expansion, improved transportation and social development in the 19th century. Among the consequences of such changes, British women started defying Victorian social taboos travelling alone by train in Britain, while many upper middle class women began traversing and discovering the Indian subcontinent (Samson 2020). Through their travel writings, women on the one hand contravened societal norms and were viewed as challengers of what was considered a masculine genre; on the other hand, they were never completely free from British moral codes and interests. While describing and providing their subjective perspectives on all they encountered in India, Victorian women produced transculturation (Pratt 1992) from the colonies to the metropolis and vice versa by representing places in India while creating a demarcation between their own identities and those of the other (Samson 2021a; 2021b) wherein the other is strictly related to the concept of fixity in the ideological construction of otherness. Fixity, as an indication of cultural, historical and racial difference in colonial discourse is typified by rigidity and unchanging order yet it paradoxically includes disorder, degeneracy and repetition that characterises ambivalence of stereotyped identities (Bhabba 2013; 1984). This study, unlike most of the extant gender, socio-ideological literature, focuses on the linguistic features characterising a corpus of Victorian women’s travel journals in India (VWTJI). The methodology adopted is a mixed one. The quantitative and qualitative approach is integrated with the discourse analysis of the keywords and their repeated clusters which highlight how difference (Benwell and Stokoe 2006) is approached and how self-definition is encoded in Victorian women’s travel journals, thus contributing to colonial discourse. References Benwell, B. – E. Stokoe. (2006). Discourse and identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bhabha, H. K. (2013). “The other question: difference, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism”. In Literature politics & theory (pp. 168-192). Routledge. Bhabha, H. K. (1984). “Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse”, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis 28, 125-133. Pratt, Mary Louise. (1992). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge. Samson, C. (2021a). “Discursive identities in English historical texts”. Token 12, Jan Kochanowski University Press. Samson, C. (2021b). “Women discovering colonial India. The construal of discursive social identities in travel writings”. Token 12, Jan Kochanowski University Press. Samson, C. (2020). “Victorian women discovering and representing India in their travel journals”. In: Brownlees Nicholas. The Language of Discovery, Exploration and Settlement, pp. 128-144, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, ISBN:1-5275-4107-X.