British Narratives of Exploration:
Case Studies on the Self and Other
Editor: Frederic Regard
Empires in Perspective
978 1 85196 620 2: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 85196 595 3
This collection of essays brings together the best of modern scholarship by international specialists in empire studies. Focusing on British travel narratives from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth centuries, the essays investigate how the early explorers’ sense of self was destabilized by encounters with the Other. Close textual criticism shows how writers created characterizations of Self and Other through rhetoric, narrative devices and metaphors. Their encounters with the other brought about a destabilizing communicational exchange, whereby identities were redefined and positions redistributed. In the ‘contact zone’, same and other, ego and alter, needed to adjust their signifying and communicational practices, and came to realize that identity, both individual and collective, is unfixed and transformational.
Contents
Provisional contents
Frederic Regard, ‘Introduction: Empire's Unstable Zones’
Chapter 1: Kofi Campbell, ‘Encountering Africa: Uses of the Other in The Book of John Mandeville (1357)’
Chapter 2: Nicholas Myers and Ladan Niayesh, ‘Naming the Other, Claiming the Other in Early Modern Accounts of First Encounters’
Chapter 3: Sophie Lemercier-Goddard, ‘False Play and Dumb Show in The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake (1628)’
Chapter 4: Line Cottegnies, ‘Waterali Goes Native: Describing First Encounters in Sir Walter Raleigh's The Discovery of Guiana (1596)’
Chapter 5: Robert Sayre, ‘Domestication and recognition of the Other in John Lawson's A New Voyage to Carolina (1709)’
Chapter 6: Sandhya Patel, ‘Conflicts of Interest: Samuel Wallis at the (He)art of First Encounter in Tahiti (1767)’
Chapter 7: Anne Dromart, ‘Distance and Proximity in James Cook's First Voyage around the World (1768-1771)’
Chapter 8: Christian Moser, ‘Walking in the Contact Zone: Cook, Forster, and the Peripatetic Mode of Exploration (1768-77)’
Chapter 9: Cheryl Cundell, ‘The Disorder of Things: Empiricism and the Cartographic Enterprise, or, the Observations of Samuel Hearne (1795) and Alexander Mackenzie (1801)’
Chapter 10: Catherine Lanone, ‘John Franklin and the Idea of the North: Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819, 1820, 1821 and 1822’
Chapter 11: Jennifer Scott, ‘Picturing Pre-Confederation Canada: Anna Jameson's Use of the Picturesque in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838)’
Chapter 12: Anne-Pascale Bruneau, ‘Commerce, diplomacy and the construction of self and other in Hugh Clapperton's Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa, from the Bight of Benin to Soccatoo (1829)’
Chapter 13: Nicoletta Brazzelli, ‘From Fact to Fiction: Henry Morton Stanley's Encounters with the African Wilderness (1872-90)’
Chapter 14: Virginia Richter, ‘Darwin in Patagonia: Descriptive strategies in the Beagle Diary (1831-6) and The Voyage of the Beagle (1845)’
Chapter 15: Florence D'souza, ‘Trying to Understand: James Tod among the Rajputs (1829, 1832)’
Chapter 16: Frédéric Regard, ‘Victorian Hybridities: EB Tylor's Anahuac (1861) and RF Burton's Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage (1856)’
Chapter 17: Sophie Menoux, ‘Migrating Selves and Shifting Egos: Walter Besant in the Indian Ocean (The Bourbon Journal, 1863); Autobiography, 1902)’
Chapter 18: Christine Reynier, ‘The Mountain as Other and the Rhetoric of the Mountaineer in Edward Whymper's Scrambles amongst the Alps in the Years 1860-1869 (1871)’