“The exotic is me or another.” Space and time in travelogues: the Countess of Merlin and Luisa Valenzuela

Authors

  • Susanna Regazzoni

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4312/vh.20.2.273-283

Keywords:

Travel literature, women writers, identities

Abstract

The study focuses on two examples of travel writers. The first one is a nineteenth century French Cuban writer, Countess of Merlin, who travelled alone from Paris to Havana in the mid-nineteenth century observing the world from an intermediate perspective, between the estrangement of a colonizer and the colonized. The fruit of this experience is La Havane (1844). The second one is Argentina’s Luisa Valenzuela (born in Buenos Aires 1938), who rewrote the fairy tale “If this is life, I am Little Red Riding Hood”, which belongs to the collection “Cuentos de Hades” (Fairy/Hell Tales), published in Simetrás (1993). By studying the characteristics of this genre, which are very different in the two centuries considered, one can detect the importance of time as a factor in the emotional and existential perspective typical in the point of view of both travellers in the texts considered.

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Author Biography

Susanna Regazzoni

Susanna Regazzoni es catedrática de Lengua y Literaturas Hispanoamericanas de la Universidad Ca’ Foscari de Venecia. Sus intereses de investigación se centran en las literaturas española e hispanoamerianas de los siglos XIX y
XX, con especial atención a las cuestiones de gender, a la construcción de la identidad cultural en el siglo XIX, a las relaciones culturales entre Italia y Argentina, y a las características del discurso literario en Argentina y en Cuba. Entre sus últimas publicaciones están La condesa de Merlin. Una escritora entre dos mundos o de la retórica de la mediación (2009); Escritoras hispanoamericanas
del siglo XIX (2011); en colaboración ha editado Más allá del umbral. Autoras hispanoamericanas y el ofi cio de la escritura (2010). 

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Published

31.12.2012

How to Cite

Regazzoni, S. (2012). “The exotic is me or another.” Space and time in travelogues: the Countess of Merlin and Luisa Valenzuela. Verba Hispanica, 20(2), 273–283. https://doi.org/10.4312/vh.20.2.273-283

Issue

Vol. 20 No. 2 (2012)

Section

Literature

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