Spain has long been an enormously popular subject of travel narration, complete with its own array of highly exoticized representational conceits. Less well recognized, the economic and technological developments of the industrial revolution that spurred the rise of individual mobility across the European continent were present within Spain as well, resulting in an ever-growing body of Spanish-authored travel narration from the mid-nineteenth century on. Aurora Bertrana (1892-1974), daughter of the celebrated Catalán modernist writer Prudenci Bertrana and a noted author and journalist in her own right, occupies a unique position within this literary corpus. One of the first Spanish women to publish accounts of her travel experiences in non-European lands (in Bertrana’s case, Morocco and the South Pacific), the interpretative gaze she casts on the people and places she visits, as well as on herself, creates a rich and uniquely-focused window onto mid-twentieth century cultural construction and, as I will further discuss in my presentation, brings to the fore, through the exercise of female mobility in destinations explicitly construed as marking both a geographic and metaphorical ‘limit’ (a category which, for Bertrana, would also include her home nation of Spain) her ongoing efforts to interrogate the nature and implications of the modern.

Authors:
Gayle Nunley, University of Vermont, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Gayle Nunley is currently Associate Professor in the School of World Languages & Cultures and the Global Studies Program at the University of Vermont (USA). Her research focuses on issues of mobility and cultural representation.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Wednesday Schedule

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