The travel narrative, in its various fictional and nonfictional forms, offers a particularly productive site for work on literature and science. Judy Hayden, in her introduction, focuses on the “intersections and cross-fertilization” (1) of these different (modern) fields of inquiry that arose in part because there were no categorical boundaries between the literary and scientific during the period. In this context, the travel narative provides a particularly useful site where “[l]anguage, science, observation, and literary discourse merge” (8).
The nexus of concerns that Hayden defines is, as the voluminous footnotes to some of the introductory essays suggest, an area with a long history of critical interest. In this context, it is apparent that this collection is forced to confront problems of organization similar to those encountered in the early modern period, when the exploration of the New World threw up a profusion of reports, maps, and materials. The tightly focused first section provides one approach to such difficulties: Daniel Carey and Jason Pearl offer a pair of accounts of attempts to organize travelers’ reports by means of instructions and interrogatories, and Julia Schleck analyzes late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century travel narratives by gentry and merchants in terms of their rhetorical credibility. Carey traces the history of instructions to travellers, from Spanish heads of inquiry in the New World through the development of the ars apodemica, Bacon’s projected natural histories, and Hartlib’s interrogatories. Pearl takes on a similar set of concerns from Oldenburg and Royal Society down into the eighteenth century. As he points out, there were problems with attempts to standardize the received accounts, as “the instructions … were preliminary descriptions, only without the informational content” (73); many authors also prewrote the knowledge of the world that they later discovered. Indeed, these heads and directions say more about the state and forms of knowledge-making in Europe than about the sorts of discoveries made overseas.
The two central sections are, by comparison, more miscellaneous. “New World, New Science” contains four essays on the intersections of new scientific knowledge and the exploration of loosely defined new worlds. Geraldine Barnes discusses medieval theories of the monstrous in William Dampier’s late seventeenth-century account of New Holland and those theories’ long historical afterlife; Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker examine the specter of English Civil War violence in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World; Judy Hayden looks at Aphra Behn’s Oronooko as a natural history of Surinam; and Marcia Nichols’s revealing essay shows how the satiric pornotopia of Merryland plays off of both colonial depictions of new lands as women and popular medical texts on conception and abortion. In “Charting Knowledge, Mapping Encounters,” Howard Marchitello discusses how the lunar voyage narrative, which had its roots in Lucian and Plutarch satiric writings, was transformed in the aftermath of Galileo’s observations with the telescope; and Jesse Edwards considers Daniel Defoe’s tour of the British Isles, in which the most interesting prodigies and curiosities are the profusion of economic products. There are significant topical and thematic crossovers amongst these essays: Barnes, for example, picks up on Dampier from the end of Pearl’s essay. Both Marchitello and Nelson and Barnes are interested in the use of fictions to enable new thinking. Hayden and Edwards show how narratives can work as catalogues of the natural and artificial products of a nation. However, the effect of these studies suggests the complexity of writing about the new places and new things discovered by Europeans during this period as much as the variety of uses that these modes might be put to in addressing other topics.
The haphazardness of the collection becomes most clear in the context of the book’s final essay, in which Barbara Benedict discusses the relationship between travel narratives and cabinets of curiosity. Collecting is itself a vibrant subfield, but Benedict’s approach shows how “the passionately thing-centered practice of early Restoration collectors” (210) can also be seen in the extensive catalogues of people, places, and things recorded in travel narratives, diaries, and other accounts. In doing so, she provides the complement to the book’s early chapters, demonstrating how the things collected might be ordered and displayed for the observer’s edification and for the renown of the collector — and how classification after the fact produces entirely different schemes of organization. Here, as in this collection of essays, curious material and orderly frameworks do not quite meet and match, though that itself is part of the interest for the reader.
