Juana Manuela Gorriti

Abstract The Argentine writer Juana Manuela Gorriti was one of the most active intellectuals of 19th-century South America and was also, essentially, a traveler. Travel was a constant trope in Gorriti’s writing and a continuous event in her life. The author became a traveler—first through exile at an early age and then through several voluntary displacements. Through travel, Gorriti explored different zones of the 19th-century literary terrain and was able to imprint her own perspectives on literature, modernity, and women’s domestic and political roles in society, among other central themes of her time. By traveling, moreover, Gorriti was able to articulate the history and particularities of three countries: Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru. Whether traveling herself or making her fictional characters travel through unexplored regions of these three countries, the author confronts the cultural and geographical boundaries between nations—as they were established by legal and political authorities or by other travelers of her period—and presents an extended homeland: a collection of uneven regions, temporalities, and subjectivities in constant interaction. Travel, ultimately, can be perceived as the essence of her work and the trope that allowed her to become a modern writer, one who adopted a wide variety of literary genres and aesthetics.