“Spellbinding Portugal: Two British Women’s Travel Voices”

Abstract

A genre prone to the thematization of cultural difference, travel writing has, in recent decades, attracted great attention within the area of the Social Sciences and Humanities and gained the respect of both academics and critics. Travel writers are mediator fgures who, through their literary constructs, resulting from their experience of mobility and confrontation with alterity, may shape and circulate positive ideas about foreign cultural realities, thus facilitating openness to difference, empathy, acceptance, understanding, admiration. This article analyses Sybille Bedford’s and Brigid Brophy’s representation of Portugal, paying attention to the authors’ focus on the natural and built landscapes and the way they seek out what they considered to be unique to this Iberian country, thus promoting an image of it as a spellbinding place, charming and exotic, worth the journey.