Beyond epistemological confinement: The sentimental ethos of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters

  1. Yolanda Caballero Aceituno 1
  1. 1 Universidad de Jaén
    info

    Universidad de Jaén

    Jaén, España

    ROR https://ror.org/0122p5f64

Revista:
Feminismo/s
  1. García-Cuevas García, Raquel (coord.)
  2. Prieto García-Cañedo, Sara (coord.)

ISSN: 1696-8166,  1989-9998

Ano de publicación: 2020

Título do exemplar: Departures and Arrivals: Women, Mobility and Travel Writing

Número: 36

Páxinas: 23-48

Tipo: Artigo

DOI: 10.14198/FEM.2020.36.02 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openRUA editor

Outras publicacións en: Feminismo/s

Resumo

In the eighteenth century sentimentalism emerged as an ideological and artistic movement highlighting the value of an alternative episteme that posed a challenge to the cult of reason. The Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, are permeated by a sentimental rhetoric aimed at materialising an ethos based on openness, cultural symbiosis and epistemological expansion that contributed to destabilising patriarchal Anglocentric narratives. Following Yuri M. Lotman, in her fruitful mediating position between two different cultural «semiospheres» (Eastern and Western), Montagu could be described as a frontier writer who used her physical journey as a vehicle for literaturising a vitalist cosmovision enabling her to transcend epistemological and emotional constraints. The ideology of her epistolary narrative was effectively encoded by using sentimental motifs, tropes and ideas that generated a unique textuality, the anatomy of which is analysed in this article.

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Fonte de datos: Dialnet