Woman, body and adventure in Ada María Elflein’s travel narrative (La Prensa, 1913-1919)

Abstract

Between 1913 and 1918 Ada María Elflein traveled as a correspondent of La Prensa to several Argentine provinces and wrote a series of travel stories in which nature is presented as wild, based on a sublime imaginary whose effects are tangible in the body of the narrator, in opposition to the bodies of “the others” (representatives of nineteenth-century “barbarie”) which become picturesque and are thus assimilated as subjects of the nation. In this way, Elflein promotes these experiences to her public readership, massive and urban, and, at the same time, expresses through her writing the sensoriality of a modern feminine body that turns its experience outdoors into an adventure.