Features a collection of essays that focus on British travel narratives from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth centuries. This work investigates how the early explorers' sense of self was destabilised by encounters with the Other.
Chapter 1 Introduction: Articulating Empire's Unstable Zones, Frederic Regard; Chapter 1a Encountering Africa: Uses of the Other in the Book of John Mandeville (1357), Kofi Campbell; Chapter 2 Naming the Other, Claiming the Other in Early Modern Accounts of First Encounters: From Mandeville to John Nicholl (1607) and Richard Jobson (1623), Nicholas Myers, Ladan Niayesh; Chapter 3 False Play and Dumb Show in the World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake (1628), Sophie Lemercier-Goddard; Chapter 4 'Waterali' Goes Native: Describing First Encounters in Sir Walter Ralegh's the Discovery of Guiana (1596), Line Cottegnies; Chapter 5 Domestication and Recognition of the Other in John Lawson's a New Voyage to Carolina (1709), Robert Sayre; Chapter 6 The (He) Art of First Encounter at Tahiti: Samuel Wallis's Conflicts of Interest (1767), Sandhya Patel; Chapter 7 Distance and Proximity in James Cook's First Voyage Around the World (1768-71), Anne Dromart; Chapter 8 Walking in the Contact Zone: Georg Forster and the Peripatetic Mode of Exploration (1768-77), Christian Moser; Chapter 9 The Disorder of Things: Empiricism and the Cartographic Enterprise, or, The Observations of Samuel Hearne (1795) and Alexander Mackenzie (1801), Cheryl Cundell; Chapter 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; Chapter 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; Chapter 12 Trying to Understand: James Tod Among the Rajputs (1829, 1832), Florence D’Souza; Chapter 13 Shifting Perspectives: Visual Representation and the Imperial 'I' in Anna Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838), Jennifer Scott; Chapter 14 Charles Darwin in Patagonia: Descriptive Strategies in the Beagle Diary (1831-1836) and the Voyage of the Beagle (1845), Virginia Richter; Chapter 15 Fieldwork as Self-Harrowing: Richard Burton's Cultural Evolution (1851-1856), Frédéric Regard; Chapter 16 Fictionalizing the Encounter with the Other: Henry Morton Stanley and the African Wilderness (1872-1890), Nicoletta Brazzelli;
