Contenu du sommaire

The travel guide is a flexible literary category capable of absorbing a broad range of narrative styles and genres. Andrew Boorde's The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge (1547) is an eminent example of such fluidity and versatility. On the face of it, the book presents itself like an entertaining precursor to our modern travel guides and phrase books, written by a priest, physician and government informant at the service of Henry VIII's minister Thomas Cromwell. And yet, reflecting the uncertainty and the confusion of the first decade of England's break with Rome, the book repeatedly intersects with the period's key concern of negotiating a personal and an English identity, and a place for the self in the midst of many religious and political turbulences both at home and abroad.

When Thomas Roe went to the court of Emperor Jahangir as an ambassador of James I, he had two sets of readers to cater for in his correspondence back home––East India Company officials and a select aristocratic and royal audience. The form of the correspondence differed as a result, with his detailed description of the seventeenth-century Mughal court, and its practices, laws, and administration targeted towards the latter readers. Roe seeks to define Mughal India by a set of attributes which are diametrically opposed to those of Jacobean England and, by extension, Europe. In a sense, the journal also involved providing a portrayal of England for his English readers. While most critics argue that Roe's binaries suggest a characteristically western perception which fails to comprehend the Oriental, this article suggests that Roe's attempt to define India by opposition to the West involves, rather, a deliberate erasure of the similarities between the two in many respects. His refusal to acknowledge the points of connection indicates a desire to deflect onto the oriental “other” what he wished to disown in the “self.” Moreover, since the theatrical image that he recurrently employs to critique the unreality of the Mughal court especially resonated in the English context, it undermines the basis of his agenda of differentiation.

This article examines the distinctly Calvinist understanding of India underlying Edward Terry's 1655 Voyage to East-India. It argues that Calvinism provided Terry with a set of assumptions that helped translate the raw data of his own experiences in India into culturally useful geographical knowledge accessible to his non-travelling readers. For Calvin, creation is an expression of the creator, one that is precisely ordered and uniquely accommodated to human cognition; as such, it is a finely crafted rhetorical statement, full of tropes and figures intended to be read and glossed. Terry builds upon this conception of the world to construct a portrait of India that construes it as part of a divinely authored argument a contrariis writ large across the breadth of creation, a figure juxtaposed against England in order to amplify—according to good rhetorical practice—its respective virtues and vices.

The Anglican chaplain Edward Terry's extended account of India, published in revised and expanded form in 1655 as A Voyage to East-India, has often been misunderstood by his critics. His tendency to engage in digressive homilies has presented an obstacle for some readers, preventing access to otherwise useful historical information on the country and the Mughal court of Jahangir (1569-1627). I argue that, far from posing a barrier to his narrative, these interpolations constitute a crucial feature of his design of the work. Inset stories allow scope for his moral vision to emerge. The moral and spiritual meaning of travel is then drawn out through commentary, above all in the form of glosses that define the meaning of his observations and experience. This is also a work of considerable literary sophistication, distinguished not only by the author's religious sensibility but also by his fashioning of character portraits—vibrant studies of marginal European figures in India living in strained circumstances. This essay attempts to recover aspects of Terry's text that have been overlooked previously, both generically and in terms of his religious purpose.

The phenomenon of Christian captivity in the Barbary states of North Africa constituted one of the most challenging instances of cultural encounter in the early modern period. As Nabil Matar has remarked, “it was the only encounter with non-European people who not only enslaved [Christians] but tempted them away from their history and religion” (Matar 1996, 194-95). “Turning Turk”––the common phrase for conversion to Islam––came about for a number of reasons, captivity being prominent among them. Critics such as Matar, Robert Davis, Daniel Vitkus, Linda Colley, among others, have told this story from a variety of historical and literary perspectives, offering insight into religious conflict, national identity, and stage representations in order to tell the story. In this essay, I consider the ways in which discussion of captivity and conversion focused on physical violation of the Christian body. Specifically, I look at the fear and suspicion aroused by the threat of Islamic circumcision of male captives.

Comparing the work of James Macpherson and Samuel Johnson, this article considers how travel writing on Highland Scotland responded to notions of the Gaelic Scots as a distinct “race” on the island of Britain. In particular it examines the role of clan chiefdom in the construction of Highland race, and how the patterns of hereditary elitism influenced notions of genealogical otherness at that time. The article first considers how clan society was approached in the field of human variety theory, before going on to examine James Macpherson's “Ossianic” vision of Highland society, and its relationship with Samuel Johnson's famous travel account, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775).

This article centres on representations of flight and conflict in Victorian female travellers' narratives of the Indian Uprising of 1857-58. The abrupt disruption of seemingly secure imperial order exposes the pragmatic realities of transport in British India. British army officers waver helplessly in the face of broken carriage wheels, recalcitrant horses and vanished servants, while their wives need to navigate the roads of an India whose revolutionary political upheaval has transformed the experiential reality of its terrain. Examining the representation of colonial transport through the blended genres of travel writing, refugee memoir and conflict narrative, I argue that the failures and makeshift arrangements produced by imperial crisis become a means through which British women travellers sought to conceptualise a more fundamental breakdown—the shattered illusion of spatial, temporal and ultimately epistemological control.