Political Affairs of the Heart

Female Travel Writers, the Sentimental Travelogue, and Revolution, 1775-1800

Linda Van Netten Blimke

2022
238 pages
$34.95
ISBN 9781684484058
Transits

Richly researched and engagingly written, Political Affairs of the Heart traces the emergence of female sentimental travel writing in late eighteenth-century Britain, and posits its centrality to women's engagement with national and gender politics. This study examines four travel narratives written by women between 1774 and 1795, convincingly arguing that they effectively deploy the discourse of sensibility to engage with debates around Britain's national identity during the French and American Revolutions. Van Netten Blimke contends that Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1768) - which first introduced sentimental discourse to the travelogue - facilitated women's gradual inclusion into this previously male-dominated genre, effectively paving the way for women to influence the country's sociopolitical transformation. These four previously understudied works successfully combine eyewitness authority with the language of sensibility to mount impassioned interventions in their nation's perception and practice of revolutionary politics, at a time when its national identity was most in flux.

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Reviews
"In Political Affairs of the Heart, Van Netten Blimke insightfully analyzes the discursive challenges in women's travel writing."
- Eighteenth-Century Fiction, October 2023

"In Van Netten Blimke's impressively researched study, four writers from across the political spectrum use sentimental travel to intervene in debates about colonialism, war, and national or imperial identity, significantly advancing our understanding of women writers' strategies for navigating gender constraints in a literary genre that women had just recently entered."
- Elizabeth Bohls, coeditor of Travel Writing 1700-1830: An Anthology

"Van Netten Blimke reveals the many ways in which women travel writers used the language and tropes of sensibility as they explored the lessons of the world-changing events of the French and American Revolutions. Her lively study will be of interest to anyone working in the eighteenth century as it excavates the complex intellectual milieus represented in these widely underrated books."
- Katherine Turner, editor of A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy

"Richly researched and elegantly argued, Political Affairs of the Heart recovers the complex contemporary resonances of eighteenth-century sentimental travel writing and demonstrates emphatically how women used the form to make a variety of interventions in political and moral debate."
- Carl Thompson, author of The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination

About the author:

Linda Van Netten Blimke is an associate professor of English at Concordia University of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, where she teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. She is the coeditor of Crossing Canada, 1907: Hope Hook's Diary.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $130.00, 9781684484065; EPUB: $34.95, 9781684484072