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
The tale begins in sixteenth-century Venice, when explorer Juan de Fuca encountered English merchant Michael Lok and relayed a fantastic story of a marine passageway that connected the Pacific and Atl
Taking as its point of departure The Odyssey, Plato’s account of Atlantis and The Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, this book examines the profound influence of these works on the development of island f
A vogue for travel a€?stuntsa€? flourished in England between 1590 and the 1620s: playful imitations or burlesques of maritime enterprise and overland travel that collectively appear to be a response
In this work of Hakluyt—a Renaissance diplomat, scholar, and spy—lies the beginnings of geography, economics, ethnography, and the modern world itself.
Lawrence H. Konecny and Clinton Machann take readers beyond the bare facts to the human stories of immigration from the point of view of English and Czech immigrants whose tales provide fascinating co
