Plotting Movement: Epistemologies of Local Travel in Early Modern England, 1600-1660.

Local Travel;Early Modern Travel;Early Modern English Literature;Drama;Map;English Language and Literature;Humanities;English Language & Literature

Ambrose, Laura A.Schoenfeldt, Michael C. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Local Travel;    Early Modern Travel;    Early Modern English Literature;    Drama;    Map;    English Language and Literature;    Humanities;    English Language & Literature;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/58462/lauraaw_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation argues that local journeys provided the most frequent and salient ways by which the English came to know, understand, and represent travel in their everyday lives. By the turn of the seventeenth century, the geographic, social, and conceptual terrain of travel—what I term England’s travelscape—was forever altered as new technologies of transport were introduced alongside developing navigational techniques, cartographic knowledge, and the rise of print. Nonetheless, texts depicting travel within England, Scotland, and Wales have been overshadowed by the period’s monumental narrative accounts of oceanic voyaging in the ;;Age of Discovery” and are largely absent from discussions of early modern travel. My dissertation responds to this absence by assembling an archive of local travel texts (drama, narrative accounts, almanacs, travel guides, maps, and pamphlets) that interrogate the tropes of ;;distance” and ;;encounter” derived from the foreign voyage narrative and, instead, represent journeying as a phenomenon of movement.In their attention to phenomenological aspects of travel, the different genres of local journeying draw on a range of representational modes to ;;plot” travel. Some, like the accounts of domestic journeying by William Kemp (Nine Daies Wonder), Anthony Nixon (A True Relation of the admirable Voyage and Travell of William Bush), and John Taylor (A Voyage in a Paper-Boat) use narrative to rework the terms of foreign travel for the local domain. The plays of George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston (Eastward Ho!), Thomas Heywood (The English Traveller), Richard Brome (The Antipodes) and Aston Cokayne (The Obstinate Lady) plot actual and metatheatrical journeys for their audiences: coach rides, staged trips, and imaginary travels. Others such as John Evelyn’s almanac diary and John Norden’s travel guide England. An Intended Guyde represent travel through a combination of visual, discursive, and numeric elements. My dissertation contends that the spatial, graphic, and narrative ;;plots” generated by the texts and technologies of local journeying highlight the emergence of an alternative epistemology of travel. Characterized by engagements with space, time, difficulty, and means of transport, this epistemology is deeply indebted to the domestic journey and recognizes travel as a phenomenon of movement.