British narratives of exploration

About this book

This collection of essays brings together the best of modern scholarship by international specialists in empire studies. Focusing on British travel narratives from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth centuries, the essays investigate how the early explorers' sense of self was destabilized by encounters with the Other. Close textual criticism shows how writers created characterizations of Self and Other through rhetoric, narrative devices and metaphors. Their encounters with the other brought about a destabilizing communicational exchange, whereby identities were redefined and positions redistributed. In the 'contact zone', same and other, ego and alter, needed to adjust their signifying and communicational practices, and came to realize that identity, both individual and collective, is unfixed and transformational.