Mary Baine Campbell

This chapter presents the concepts discussed in this book, which is a collection of scholarly essays related to John Mandeville's Travels by scholars in England and France who produce a complex and sometimes contradictory view of the book as an important object of early modern attention, as well as a feature of early modern literary context. The first part of the book provides accounts of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century travels of the Travels' variable text in its English or 'Insular' versions, along with some account of the epistemological considerations that accompanied its travel to the more pragmatic economic and colonial concerns of the Tudor and Jacobean periods. The second examines the historical discourse on the Turks and Islam in early modern England, Mandevillian geography, and the importance of medieval culture to the understanding of a European Renaissance. The last section is concerned with the invented medium of the commercial theatre.

Echo and Narcissus, or Man O Man! is the only surviving fragment of an early dramatic work of Shakespeare’s, perhaps his first – some critics argue it was composed before he left home and saw his first play performed. It shows signs of immaturity in its stagecraft. (Though a well-funded contemporary production could work technological magic with the pool in which Narcissus sees his mirror image and, perhaps, hears his mirror voice. Or sees his mirror-voice.) Shakespeare would return to Ovid for material more than once in his career (Carroll, 1985), and his wry, choric clowns are often taken, as here,

Bringing together original contributions from scholars around the world, this volume traces the history of travel writing from antiquity to the Internet age. It examines travel texts of several national or linguistic traditions, introducing readers to the global contexts of the genre. From wilderness to the urban, from Nigeria to the polar regions, from mountains to rivers and the desert, this book explores some of the key places and physical features represented in travel writing. Chapters also consider the employment in travel writing of the diary, the letter, visual images, maps and poetry, as well as the relationship of travel writing to fiction, science, translation and tourism. Gender-based and ecocritical approaches are among those surveyed. Together, the thirty-seven chapters here underline the richness and complexity of this genre.