Mendez Rodenas has spent many years researching this work and she is well read in the scholarship of travel writing. . . .Each chapter in this book is structured to work as a stand-alone essay that focuses on a particular approach. . . .Mendez separates the work effectively so as to point out similarities in approach, while still acknowledging the individual voice. . . .[T]his is an impressive work.

Studies in Travel Writing

Méndez Rodenas’s reading of these women travelers complements the imperial and postcolonial criticism about travel writing, and opens new routes for understanding female travel writing in more complex and dynamic aspects. The book is written with sophistication and offers a comprehensive bibliographic state of the question in women’s travel, establishing a fruitful dialogue with it across areas and disciplines, between European and Latin American studies.

Modern Language Notes

Clustered around the trope of transatlantic pilgrimage, five European women travelers find their way into the pages of Adriana Méndez Rodenas’s insightful and beautifully illustrated account of a neglected chapter in the archive of Latin American literature. . . .Transatlantic Travels reminds us that European women travelers chronicled the defining events of post-independence America, and in doing so they left their marks as witnesses and interpreters, as social commentators, naturalists, archaeologists, historiographers, and ethnographers. And as such, Méndez Rodenas convincingly argues, shaped the way we understand and read the literary and historiographical foundational texts of the new republics.

Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas