El viaje romántico en clave de género: Carolina Coronado y su paseo europeo desde el Tajo al Rin

Abstract

This work focuses on one of the very few examples of women's travel literature during Spanish Romanticism: the series of seven articles published by Carolina Coronado in the newspaper La Ilustración between 1851 and 1852 under the title «Un paseo desde el Tajo al Rhin. Descansando en el Palacio de Cristal». In the mid-19th century, Spanish women, unlike their European counterparts, still showed little inclination to travel and, moreover, their marginal socio-literary position was not an incentive to leave a written record of their few trans-Pyrenean excursions. Carolina Coronado, however, travelled around Europe for several months and dared to recount her experience in a literary genre unusual for Spanish women through the pages of one of the most modern illustrated newspapers of the time, which constitutes a female intellectual and authorial assertion that is absolutely unusual in our cultural context of the mid-1800s. This article reviews the discoursive strategies, devices and negotiations through which Carolina Coronado's exercise of authority was able to find its place in the public sphere —the nineteenth-century Spanish press— to become a singular example of female romantic travel literature.