Leaving home, we learn about the strange practices of foreign cultures: a domain of fraught and enlightening exchanges. Or maybe not: for a contemporary reader of such early modern travelogues, exaggeration and lying, generic features of the travelogue since time immemorial, may now seem most prominent. Sometimes such lying revolved around the legitimation of colonial aggression. Often it involved the projective creation of fantastic “Others.” Englishmen, however, were by no means invariably the dominant party in such cultural exchanges. Moreover, the perspectival shifts involved with traveling always risked, or indeed invited, the introduction of utopian or dystopian elements, and so the sudden estrangement of home. Beyond wonders and grotesqueries, potentially discomfiting elements and home truths, so to speak, continually turned up in imaginary travelogues.

Readings will be drawn from a list that includes Sir Thomas More, Utopia; William Shakespeare, The Tempest; Sir Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis; poems by John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and Aphra Behn; Aphra Behn, Oronooko; The Travels of Sir John Mandeville(anonymous); Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters; Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Jonathan Swift,Gulliver’s Travels; and Henry Fielding, A Journey from This World to the Next.

We will look at a range of genres, from utopias to plays to novels to travelogues to satires to poems. The class will emphasize the close reading of texts. Our research project is likely to include engagement with travelogues (or compilations thereof) by Richard Hakluyt, Samuel Purchas, and William Dampier.