“‘Nowhere is a Place’: Travel Writing in Sixteenth-Century England” (original) (raw)

2005, ”, Literature Compass 2, RE 135: 1-13

Travel is an experience of cultural encounters; the account that witnesses and represents that experience is not only a literary text but also a cultural document, involving issues of power, knowledge, and identity. In sixteenth-century England the popularity of travel accounts, which documented colonial aspirations, quixotic voyages, and mercantile ventures, manifests that the book as an integral part of the voyage has the power to inform and instruct. Narratives by authors such as Sir Walter Ralegh, Robert Dallington, Fynes Moryson, and Thomas Dallam, depended on the pun between travel ( journeying) and travail (toil, pain), presenting the adventures and adversities of travelers together with information on geographical areas with their human societies and cultures, linked to questions of nationality, race, and gender. The written record of the great number of early travels, represented in Richard Hakluyt's and later in Samuel Purchas's collections, attests to the rise of England's colonial and commercial power, as well as to the significance of travel writing in English literary history. Despite the contemporary debate over the purpose of going abroad and representing foreign countries, travel, like translation – a word semantically related to it – functioned as a cross-cultural process challenging the boundaries of both geographical and ideological insularity.