JONATHAN P. A. SELL, Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560 1613.

Abstract

AS the author readily points out (p. 23), the hack-poet Richard Braithwaite reiterated in 1631 the age-old suspicion that ‘travellers, poets and liars are three words of one significance’. Such a view highlights the importance and often wry perspectives of Sell's lively examination of the roles of ‘rhetoric’ and ‘wonder’ in Elizabethan and Jacobean travel writings. ‘Wonder’ is defined here as a concept at the very heart of philosophy, aesthetic experience, and discourse. It is productively applied to such varied texts as Othello and The Tempest, the picaresque and often fantastic memoirs of the master-gunner and adventurer Edward Webbe (The Rare and Most Wonderful Things … Seen in the Lands of Jewry, Egypt, Grecia, Russia, and Prester John, 1590); the geographically diverse travel writings of Arthur Barlowe, Sir Anthony Sherley, Edward Hayes, and (mostly importantly for this study) Sir Walter Ralegh's protean The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana (first published in 1596). At the heart of Sell's investigation lies an exploration of how in such texts documentary verisimilitude was often rendered secondary to the purveying of a calculated range of intellectual and emotional significances as a means of creating—for specific social, political, national, or purely subjective purposes—perspectives on what might be described as ‘consensual’ truth. Travel writers of this period, seeking to link themselves with an increasingly empiricist age, might claim to be distrustful of a supposedly outmoded metaphorical epistemology that was heavily reliant upon the verbal manipulations and ‘wordish descriptions’ of rhetoric. But as they attempted to describe, define, and intellectually ‘possess’ strange and foreign territories, they found that they simply could not do without some of the more manipulative and dramatic elements of the rhetorical arts.