| Abstract |
This paper ventures to study the mid-20th century travel writing by three women writers, Hsu Chung-pei, Chung Mei-yin, and Wang Yen-ju, under the concept of “the economy of travel” proposed by Georges Van Den Abbeele. In doing so, this paper discusses how women writers open up a relatively democratic space for criticism on social and gender issues under the martial law rule. In order to observe what effects the intrinsic quality of women’s travel literature brings to the constitution of literary narrative, this paper also analyzes the travel experiences and the transition of identity represented in the texts. To sum up, it is not only the intellectuality and prose aesthetic, but also the process of identifying a local and domestic self from the foreign others that defines the significance of women writers’ travel literature in the mid-20th century Taiwan. |
