Voyages in Print
English Narratives of Travel to America 1576–1624

A re-reading of American colonial voyage narratives and their reception since the Victorian era.

Mary C. Fuller (Author)

9780521481618, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 September 1995

228 pages, 21 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.8 cm, 0.48 kg

"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

The decades leading up to England's first permanent American colony saw not only territorial and commercial expansion but also the emergence of a vast and heterogeneous literature. In the multiple relations of writing to discovery over these decades, these texts played a role more powerful than that of simple recording. They needed to establish certain realities against a background of scepticism - the possibility of discovery, the lands discovered, the intentions and experiences of the discoverers - and they also had to find ways of theorizing their enterprise. Yet conceiving of the American enterprise positively or even survivably proved surprisingly difficult; 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 from the Victorian era on has often accepted their claims of heroism and mastery; through a careful re-reading, Mary Fuller argues for a more complicated, less glorious history.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]