Strategie narrative e metanarrative nel travelogue scandinavo di Mary Wollstonecraft: Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark

A fundamental step in the author’s human and artistic development, "Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark" by Mary Wollstonecraft, published by Joseph Johnson in 1796, is not only the epistolary report of an unusual journey to Scandinavia, rich in annotations about the customs and manners, the political and cultural life of those regions; it also offers itself as the “journal of a soul” in which the various facets of the author’s complex and fascinating personality emerge. This essay explores the ways in which this complexity is mirrored, at the stylistic and technical level, by a hybridization of narrative forms: as it often happens in travel writing, here too the limits between different genres ‒ epistolary narrative, journal and confessional writing, the essay ‒ turn out to be blurred. Moreover, in the essay specific attention is devoted to Wollstonecraft’s use of metanarrative devices: her Letters are interspersed with comments on the practice of travelling and on its recording considered as fundamental moments of self discovery and education.