AustLit

'Despite the continued popularity of travel blogs, there is a lack of contemporary criticism concerning the literal and figurative meanings of ‘wandering’ in the genre of online travel writing. One only has to trawl through the blogosphere to notice the number of female travellers who refer to themselves as ‘wandering’ women. However, female wandering has received little to no study in travel writing scholarship. In other words, what a ‘wandering woman’ is exactly – for example, why she wanders and how, as well as what constitutes an act of wandering – is yet to be widely theorised. Furthermore, the subversive tendency of female wandering to disrupt not only circular journeys but also stable conceptualisations of home has not been deeply explored. This paper argues that female wandering is a complex mode of travel that is characterised by the coupling of literal and figurative movement, and therefore it cannot be conceptualised through canonical understandings of departure and return. In the travel blogs presented for analysis, the authors construct non-linear narratives that are marked by boundlessness, continuity, and self-reflexivity. In this way, the blogs themselves are ‘wandering’ texts that marry the physical wandering of the body with the abstract wondering of the mind. As a result, wandering is not only the content of the blog but the defining characteristic of the text itself. When female bloggers cast themselves as wandering women, they resist the Romantic equation of wandering with suffering, and instead construct wandering as a shared reprieve rather than an individual burden. This representation of female wandering as a positive and productive endeavour is interesting given literary representations of male wandering as a curse or punishment.'

 (Publication abstract)