Isabella Bird, Victorian globalism, and Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880)

Abstract

ABSTRACTIsabella Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880, written 1878) is one of the rare Victorian travelogues about Asia that has not only won continued readership and critical prestige in the West, but has also been frequently valued by readers in the country it describes as an insightful perspective by an outsider. Our introduction to this special issue on Bird’s travel writing of Japan creates multiple frameworks for understanding this text. We position it within post-1850 representations of Japan and travelogues of the country by women writers, the overall development of Bird’s literary career, and recent theories of Victorian globalism. We argue that Unbeaten Tracks can be read as simultaneously radical and conservative, sympathetic and denunciatory, staunchly imperial and anticipatory of postcolonial critique, making it a rich object of study and an important touchstone in Victorian travel writing. If Bird’s writing occasionally seems to confirm (and to revel in) familiar stereotypes of Victorian travellers as condescending, repressed, and parochial, it can also be linked to more recent understandings of a global nineteenth century already possessing cosmopolitan awareness and utopian horizons.