RT journal article
T1 Witness to the Peninsular War: Sophia Barnard’s Travels in Andalusia
T2 Un testimonio de la Guerra de la Independencia: los viajes por Andalucía de Sophia Barnard
A1 Gifra-Adroher, Pere
K1 Sophia Barnard
K1 women’s travel writings
K1 trope of the suffering traveller
K1 British travellers in Spain
K1 Peninsular War
K1 General Ballesteros
K1 Cádiz
K1 Gibraltar
AB Drawing on several critical studies on travel writing, this article analyses thesections that Sophia Barnard devoted to Andalusia in her Travels in Algeirs [sic], Spain,&c., published in London in the mid-1820s. Married to a merchant, Barnard spent overthree years of her life abroad. She did not travel extensively in Andalusia, but her narrativeis nevertheless a valuable testimony of the situation of the area during the PeninsularWar. She visited Cádiz when it was under bombardment by the French in 1811, and afew months later she was in Algeciras on one of her husband’s business trips. During herstay in Gibraltar she also recorded her impressions of the refugees in the British colony,being of particular interest her account of the epidemic that took many lives across thearea in late 1812. Barnard uses the conventions of travel writing and the discourses offemininity and imperialism to portray Andalusia not as a Byronic Romantic land saturatedwith pleasurable experiences, but rather as a scenario full of perils and hardshipswhere the Protestant female traveller may test her virtue as mother and wife, demonstrateher unwavering Christian faith, and also assert the supremacy of Great Britain. The sameconventions enable her to justify her long residence in wartime Andalusia by fashioningherself before her readers not as a hedonistic female tourist in search of the picturesquebut rather as a suffering traveller who has derived a spiritual benefit from her journeysin the area.
PB Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz, Servicio de Publicaciones y Grupo de Estudios del Siglo XVIII
SN 2173-0687
YR 2012
FD 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10498/15230
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10498/15230
LA eng
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Cádiz
RD 24-sep-2023