| Research Abstract |
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth Britain, where, in the relationship to aesthetic categories of the sublime and picturesque, Travel writings and Gothic novels were prevailing among the reading public, not a few women have tried to appropriate and internalize the language of aesthetics (aesthetic discourse), not only as readers/consumers but also as writers/producers. But in this period, woman was conventionally regarded as an aesthetic object (an object gazed) and as a kind of foil against which the main stream aesthetic theory defined the 'man of taste' as an educated, property-owning gentleman. So several woman writers felt uneasiness in their positioning as aesthetic subjects (gazing subjects), describing the natural scenery or exotic landscape and the people living and working there, and were apt to deviate from the standard language of the aesthetics of landscape. I found this deviation to be one of common characters among them, through my research especially into their travel writings, e.g. Lady M. W. Montague (Turkey), Janet Shaw (West Indies), Helen Maria Williams (France in its Revolutionary period), Ann Radcliffe (Holland and Germany), Mary Shelley (Germany and Switzerland) and so on. I would like to argue that these travel writings are reexamining aesthetic conventions such as the concept of contemplation, exposing its vested interests, and reveal the social and political logic of the modern aesthetic theory from the points of class, race and gender, through their very deviation or (seeming) inconsistency.
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