摘要
This essay focuses on the interaction between the publication of female travel writing about the South of Italy in non-feminist 19th century British periodicals, and the circulation of a transgressive model of femininity centred on the concepts of mobility, vitality and visibility. The choice of Southern Italy, an anti-tourist destination that since the era of the Grand Tour had been considered dangerous for men, let alone for women, magnifies female heroic attitudes and contaminates female conventional domestic purity enhancing the concept of an unfixed female identity. The publication of a travelogue, a mostly non-fictional genre, on an innovative and reactive medium, was a manifest act of transgression with respect to fixed social order, which gave visibility and credibility to a different model of femininity, an anti-Angel icon. A new form of narration displays adventurous women able to cross the private sphere and to write/publish authentic accounts of their transitional experience in a public, male-dominated sphere.
