In its ongoing search for novel topics to explore in Review, our editorial advisory board voted to develop an issue on women travelers in Latin America, a topic that not only would cover seminal figures such as Flora Tristan, the French-Peruvian writer and social activist, most famously known as the grandmother of French painter Paul Gauguin, but also contemporary writers who address the theme of travel in their writing. We subsequently commissioned Prof. Adriana Me'ndez Rodenas, of the University of Iowa, as guest editor for the issue.

View the table of contents for this Special Issue and read the Editor's note

The scholarly contributions include essays by contemporary critics on Tristan along with the writer/ artist/ ecologist Maria Sibylla Merian, who traveled to Suriname in 1699 to research and document the insects and flora there; the Victorian Scotswoman Lady Florence Dixie, who wrote about her adventures in Patagonia; and Countess Paula Kollonitz, the lady-in-waiting to Empress Carlota, during Maximilian's ill-fated reign in Mexico. These far-reaching essays are complemented by illuminating texts by the travelers themselves.

Other creative contributions include fiction by modern and contemporary writers on women travelers and/or the theme of travel—fragments from Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Way to Paradise and from the late Antonio Benítez-Rojo's Woman in Battle Dress, Pola Oloixarac’s novel excerpt that imagines an encounter between inhabitants of a South Pacific island and European travelers there, Michael Schuessler’s text on Princess Salm-Salm in Mexico, and Carlos Franz’s depiction of the sublime, from his novel-in-progress The Nature of Love, which brings together Charles Darwin, the painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, and the Acongagua volcano during an earthquake in the Chilean Andes. Art critic Alicia Lubowski traces the influences of and divergences from Alexander von Humboldt on several women traveler-artists including Adela Breton and Marianne North. Finally, our book review section covers titles on travel in the Americas as well as new work in translation by a plethora of Latin American and Caribbean writers.