![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Henceforth, I use the phrase “Mediterranean region” to refer to the geography represented in The Cities of the Past. This decision responds to Cobbe’s shifting geographical terminology, as well as what Bar-Yosef (Citation2005) observes as the frequent conflation of the “‘Holy Land,’ ‘Palestine,’ and ‘Syria’” amongst nineteenth-century British travelers (Citation2005, 196). Like in Lindsey N. Chappell’s study of Trollope, a portion of Cobbe’s travels additionally fall outside of contemporary “usage boundaries of the term ‘Middle East’” (2016, 192).
2 Cobbe includes accounts of Athens (“A Day at Athens”) and Rome (“The Eternal City”), which mostly fall outside of this article’s scope.
3 The time period is characterized by the “embourgeoisement of Eastern travel,” as Melman (Citation1992) posits in her class-oriented analysis of travel to the Mediterranean (11). Though travel to the region was “not quite the great adventure it had been fifty years before,” Mitchell (Citation2004) agrees that Cobbe’s independent travel remains notable (84).
4 Frawley, in “Dessert Places/ Gendered Spaces: Victorian Women in the Middle East,” proposes that Martineau and Cobbe combine “the language of the historian” and their geographical “imagin[ations]” to achieve individual and historical “recover[ies]” (1991, 51; 50).
5 In Wanderers: A History of Women Walking (2020), Kerri Andrews tracks the relationship between physical mobility, identity formation, and the development of literary intimacies with readers.
6 See Chappell (Citation2017), Andrews (Citation2020), and Logan (Citation2010) for analyses of what Martineau experiences as a “confrontation between past and present” in Eastern Life (Logan Citation2010, 210).
7 Chappell (Citation2016) elsewhere argues that Trollope “re-temporalizes Palestine and Egypt” throughout The Bertrams (2016, 29).
8 Pratt (Citation1992) defines the imperial “contact zone” as that space in which “geographically and historically separated” populations interact and form relationships of power (8). See Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation.
9 Although many of Cobbe’s essentialisms resemble those of her contemporaries, this does not diminish the impact of their deployment. Here, I recall Edward Said’s observation that essentialisms more frequently “absolve and forgive ignorance and demagogy … than they enable knowledge” (31). See Said’s (Citation1994) Culture and Imperialism.
10 Cobbe, to draw on Mills’s (Citation1991) analysis of the nineteenth-century female traveler, frequently finds herself “pulled … in different textual directions” as she navigates the “discourses of imperialism and femininity” and her reformist goals (Citation1991, 3).
11 Notwithstanding, Frawley writes that Martineau and Cobbe pioneer new forms of travel writing, as they exceed “chronologically arranged reminiscences of daily experience” (Citation1991, 52).
12 Frawley (Citation1991) will read this quotation in the context of Cobbe’s religious divergence from her father and the “‘wall of creed’ that for so many years divided” them (61).
13 Jones (Citation1997) references Patricia Yaeger’s theorization of “the sublime of nearness” in her article “Romantic women travel writers and the representation of everyday experience” (as quoted in Jones Citation1997, 501). See Yaeger’s “Toward a Female Sublime” for further discussion of gendered encounters with the sublime (Citation1989).
14 This 1874 essay is available in an excellent edition of Cobbe’s philosophical writings compiled by Stone (Citation2022). See Frances Power Cobbe: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Feminist Philosopher.
15 Bar-Yosef (Citation2005) notes that the metaphorized “Holy Land” was “the single most popular topic for panoramas and dioramas in 1851” (141). These would have been widely viewed at the “Great Exhibition,” which Cobbe traveled to with her brother Henry in 1851 (Mitchell Citation2004, 76).
16 Without direct reference to Montgomery (Citation1835), Cobbe excerpts “AT HOME IN HEAVEN” in her travelog. The hymn appears in Montgomery’s A poet’s portfolio, or Minor poems: in three books (1835, 233).
17 The latter of these concerns is reflected in the History of Woman Suffrage (Citation1886), which quotes Cobbe as proclaiming it “utterly absurd” that members of parliament would allege that women with “ordinary common sense” would object to suffrage (865). See the third volume of History of Woman Suffrage – edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage – for additional commentary on Cobbe’s feminist advocacy.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Corey Risinger
Corey Risinger is a doctoral candidate in New York University’s Department of English Literature. Her work traces the intersections between theories of affect, life writing, and feminist archival science. In her dissertation, she proposes a model for “archival living,” or the way in which individuals simultaneously document their daily lives and feel for or through their developing archives. She has a piece forthcoming in 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era.