A New Edition of Travel Writer Maria Graham's Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (1824)

FAIN: FT-54371-06

Jennifer Hayward
College of Wooster (Wooster, OH 44691-2393)

The proposed project, a new edition of Maria Graham’s JOURNAL OF A VOYAGE TO BRAZIL (1824), originated during an NEH Summer Seminar (John McGowan and Alan Dunne, Directors, 1997). Graham, an early woman travel writer, lived in Chile and Brazil during the first years of South American independence; her experiences resulted in two books that are among the few extant records of this important historical period. This edition will include the full text of her Brazil journal as well as her original illustrations, an introductory essay, annotations, and appendices of archival and other materials (including Graham’s letters and diary extracts, contemporary reviews of the journal, maps and drawings, and a critical essay).

Associated Products

Maria Graham's Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (Book)
Title: Maria Graham's Journal of a Voyage to Brazil
Author: Maria Graham
Editor: Jennifer Hayward
Editor: M. Soledad Caballero
Abstract: Maria Graham’s Journal of a Voyage to Brazil is a scholarly edition of nineteenth century travel writer Graham’s travel narrative first published in 1824. One of only a few women travelers to have written about her experiences in South America in the early nineteenth century, Graham provides an invaluable first-hand account of Brazil and its transformation from a Portuguese colony to an independent nation. She offers not only observations about social customs, politics, and the role of the British in South America but also insights into Brazilian slavery at a time of rising abolitionist activism. This edition is unique in incorporating Graham's own unpublished corrections to her first edition and in bringing together supplementary materials to contextualize the journal, including contemporary reviews of her narrative, early nineteenth century maps of Brazil, and Graham’s unpublished autobiographical and historical sketch, “Life of Don Pedro.” The edition also provides an editors’ introduction situating Graham’s narrative in relation to the few extant travel narratives about Brazil—all written by men—as well as within the socio-historical and cultural landscape of her time, with particular focus on abolitionist discourses and the process of Brazilian independence. Graham actively imagined Brazil as a New World site of extraordinary possibility, and she envisioned herself as furthering the country’s development; she critiqued slavery in particular as a practice antithetical to Brazil’s transformation into a modern, civilized nation. Graham creates a complex, and sometimes contradictory, portrait of Brazil as a wilderness ripe with plenitude and possibility as well as an emergent nation-state, a visionary site of New World modernity.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://www.parlorpress.com/graham
Primary URL Description: Parlor Press record
Secondary URL: http://www.amazon.com/Grahams-Journal-Voyage-Brazil-Writing/dp/1602351872
Secondary URL Description: Amazon record
Publisher: Parlor Press
Type: Edited Volume

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