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This seminar is about The Turkish Embassy Letters, one of the most famous English travel reports. Published posthumously in 1763, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's account of her journey to Constantinople is the first report about a journey to the East by an English woman. Praised by a contemporary as "one of the most extraordinary shining characters in the world", Montagu, the proto-feminist, Enlightenment wit, poet, translator of Turkish poetry and campaigner for inoculation against the smallpox, has only recently been rediscovered and valued. As Teresa Heffernan writes, "like many women who rebelled against gender conventions, she was the target of vicious attacks." In this seminar we will read and discuss Montagu's letters in a global framework: in the context of Ottoman culture, Orientalist discourse and feminist criticism.
Texts:
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: The Turkish Embassy Letters. Ed. Teresa Heffernan & Daniel O'Quinn (broadview editions, 2013).
- further critical texts will be made available via the Moodle course
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