Beyond epistemological confinement: The sentimental ethos of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters

• Main Author: Caballero Aceituno, Yolanda
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad de Alicante 2020-12-01
• Series: Feminismo/s
• Online Access: https://feminismos.ua.es/article/view/2020-n36-beyond-epistemological-confinement-the-sentimental-ethos-of-lady-mary-wortley-montagus-the-turkish-embassy-letters

In the eighteenth century sentimentalism emerged as an ideological and artistic movement highlighting the value of an alternative episteme that posed a challenge to the cult of reason. The Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, are permeated by a sentimental rhetoric aimed at materialising an ethos based on openness, cultural symbiosis and epistemological expansion that contributed to destabilising patriarchal Anglocentric narratives. Following Yuri M. Lotman, in her fruitful mediating position between two different cultural «semiospheres» (Eastern and Western), Montagu could be described as a frontier writer who used her physical journey as a vehicle for literaturising a vitalist cosmovision enabling her to transcend epistemological and emotional constraints. The ideology of her epistolary narrative was effectively encoded by using sentimental motifs, tropes and ideas that generated a unique textuality, the anatomy of which is analysed in this article.