The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing

Abstract

This chapter seeks to expand an understanding of ‘expatriate’ by examining the defining choice to live elsewhere as one guided not only by aesthetic concerns but also by an ethical impulse to remake one’s life in accordance with a particular vision of ‘the good life’; in other words, expatriation as a deliberate act of displacement and a long-term process of self-transformation centred on the question, ‘How should I live?’ Susanna Moodie’s mid-nineteenth-century memoir and Frances Mayes’s late twentieth-century account illuminate common issues of identity transformation and belonging which characterise the expatriate life as it is reshaped through intercultural confrontation, negotiation and accommodation over time. The central theme of identity reformation emerges in multipart memoirs which chart the quest for a meaningful existence through discursive and life practices that displace cultural certainties and produce new identifications and identities.

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