2 Strikingly there have been many fewer studies on French and Francophone female travelers and writers until recently, mostly due to historical and cultural differences. There have also been studies on British and American female writers (see among others Shirley Foster, Sara Mills, Mary-Louise Pratt and Yaël Schlick). There have been many studies on traveling and many studies on male travel writers in France such as Montaigne, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chateaubriand or Nerval to mention just a few. Of course we realize that this volume is only a small token in the analysis of a genre that has encompassed 'a bewildering diversity of forms, modes and itineraries' (Thompson 1-2).

In this volume we present case studies of women travelers and a number of analyses of travel narratives in the pre-modern and modern periods. At the MLA session, genres and topics included representations of women travelers in plays, fantastic and mystical voyages, memoirs, epistolary novels and women travelers of color. Our stated goal was to include articles ranging from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century that focused on the literary and artistic representations of women travelers-in forced voyages or not-and the rhetorical strategies employed in the past as these voyages were recorded. Montfort sent a call for papers inviting scholars to submit essays on the topic Les femmes et le voyage for a Special Volume of WIF Studies. Soon after the MLA, Christine McCall Probes and Catherine R.

Speakers included Linda Alcott, Hélène Diaz Brown, Arline E. The project of a volume on Women and Traveling originated at the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago (January 2014) after a table ronde organized and presided by Christine McCall Probes, Voyages de femmes, entrepris et rapportés: Représentations littéraires et/ou artistiques, was particularly well received.

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