Voyages in Print: English Narratives of Travel to America 1576-1624

ISBN-13: 9780521481618 / Angielski / Twarda / 1995 / 228 str.

Mary C. Fuller

Opis

In the decades leading up to England's first permanent American colony, the literature that emerged needed to establish certain realities against a background of skepticism, and it also had to find ways of theorizing the enterprise. The voyage narratives evolved almost from the outset as a genre concerned with recuperating failure--as noble, strategic, even as a form of success. Reception of these texts since the Victorian era has often accepted their claims of heroism and mastery; this study argues for a more complicated, less glorious history.

Recenzje

"The great virtue of the book is...that it provides yet further demonstration of the extent to which literary scholars have made their own the entire subject of English overseas exploration which was studied by successive generations of historians ranging from Froude and Seeley in the ninteenth to A.L. Rowse in the present century, but which is now ignored by most practitioners of the history of early modern Britain." Nicholas Canny, Sixteenth Century Journal

Spis treści

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Early ventures: writing under the Gilbert and Ralegh patents; 2. Ralegh's discoveries: the two voyages to Guiana; 3. Mastering words: the Jamestown colonists and John Smith; 4. The 'great prose epic': Hakluyt's Voyages; Notes; Bibliography; Index.