British Narratives of Exploration:
Case Studies on the Self and Other
Editor: Frédéric 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.
Sample pages
Readership
Empire Studies, Seventeenth-, Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century History
Contents
Introduction: Articulating Empire’s Unstable Zones, Frédéric Regard
Part I: Fantasy, Wonder and Mimicry: Proto-Ethnography from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
1 Encountering Africa: Uses of the Other in The Book of John Mandeville (1357) – Kofi Campbell
2 Naming the Other, Claiming the Other in Early Modern Accounts of First Encounters: from Mandeville to John Nicholl (1607) and Richard Jobson (1623) – Ladan Niayesh and Nick Myers
3 False Play and Dumb Show in The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake (1628) – Sophie Lemercier-Goddard
4 Waterali Goes Native: Describing First Encounters in Sir Walter Ralegh’s The Discovery of Guiana (1596) – Line Cottegnies
Part II: Distance in Question: Translating the Other in the Eighteenth Century
5 Domestication and Recognition of the Other in John Lawson’s A New Voyage to Carolina (1709) – Robert Sayre
6 The (He)art of First Encounter at Tahiti: Samuel Wallis’s Conflicts of Interest (1767) – Sandhya Patel
7 Distance and Proximity in James Cook’s First Voyage around the World (1768-1771) – Anne Dromart
8 Walking in the Contact Zone: Georg Forster and the Peripatetic Mode of Exploration (1768-1777) – Christian Moser
9 The Disorder of Things: Empiricism and the Cartographic Enterprise, or, the Observations of Samuel Hearne (1795) and Alexander Mackenzie (1801) – Cheryl Cundell
Part III: Stereotypes Undermined: Shifting the Self in the Nineteenth Century
10 John Franklin and the Idea of North: Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea in the Years 1819-1822 –Catherine Lanone
11 Cultivating that mutual friendship’: Commerce, Diplomacy and Self-Representation in Hugh Clapperton’s Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa, from the Bight of Benin to Soccatoo (1829) – Anne-Pascale Bruneau
12 Trying to Understand: James Tod among the Rajputs (1829, 1832) – Florence D’Souza
13 Shifting Perspectives: Visual Representation and the Imperial ‘I’ in Anna Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) – Jennifer Scott
14 Charles Darwin in Patagonia: Descriptive Strategies in the Beagle Diary (1831–1836) and The Voyage of the Beagle (1845) – Virginia Richter
15 Fieldwork as Self-Harrowing: Richard Burton’s Cultural Evolution (1851-1856) – Frédéric Regard
16 Fictionalizing the Encounter with the Other: Henry Morton Stanley and the African Wilderness (1872-1890) – Nicoletta Brazzelli
Related titles
- Explorations of the South Seas, 1756–1792
- Race and Identity in the Tasman World, 1769–1840
- Representing Humanity in the Age of Enlightenment
- The Narrative of the Beagle Voyage, 1831–1836
- The Theatre of Empire: Frontier Performances in America, 1750–1860
- Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature
