Minds in Motion: Imagining Empiricism in Eighteenth-Century British Travel Literature by Anne M. Thell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Minds in Motion: Imagining Empiricism in Eighteenth-Century British Travel Literature by Anne M. Thell M-C. Newbould Anne M. Thell. Minds in Motion: Imagining Empiricism in Eighteenth-Century British Travel Literature, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell, 2017. Pp. xvii + 267. $105. Ms. Thell's title captures the principal concern of this engaging and erudite study: how, at distinctive points across the long eighteenth century, travel writing challenged and illuminated new aspects of empirical enquiry and its communication, and provided an apt testing ground for the period's debates about experience, perception, and their representation. As her introduction suggests, however, her chosen authors—Cavendish, Dampier, Defoe, Hawkesworth, and Johnson—operate across unstable generic boundaries. The constant tension between "scientific [End Page 110] modes of knowledge production" and "their necessarily literary representations in narrative" provides this study's backbone; its vertebrae are defined by the differing contexts in which each limb of study is articulated. Cavendish's Blazing World (1666) exemplifies "issues of authority, perspective, and imagination" that transform travel into an activity generated "by the human mind." Set against the backdrop of contemporaneous debates led by the Royal Society with regard to the appropriate mode for describing natural phenomena, Blazing World enables Cavendish to "critique" the "experimental programme" this institution proposed by promoting the imagination, which fuels the "quick movements of the mind guided by reason" to enable "intellectual fecundity and ability." Using this awareness of "constant flux and motion" Cavendish adopts multiple "subject positions" to explore and challenge other perspectives, the better to understand her own: "looking inward is the only way of viewing the vast spaces that lie beyond the self." Dampier's New Voyage Round the World (1697) engages with comparable "epistemological issues" but "from the opposite direction by taking to unsustainable extremes the rhetoric of modest witnessing." The empirical traveler's attempt to produce "natural history" in this period demonstrates the "nascent concepts of objectivity" that other critics suggest emerged in later periods. Yet Dampier struggles to reconcile the "plain" account of natural history advocated by the Royal Society with the realization that his own subjectivity repeatedly intrudes. His text consistently confronts the problem of generic instability—the boundaries of travel writing are permeable to other types of first-hand account (history, autobiography)—thus questioning "how empirical detachment can be integrated into the innately solipsistic space of narrative." Defoe, by contrast, was acutely aware of—and actively engages with—the generic permeability of travel writing. His New Voyage Round the World (1724) invites imaginative recreation. Defoe deploys visual metaphors that encourage readers to "view" possibilities beyond the narrative's immediate descriptive contours; this is "an active process of reading" that "enables an augmented perception that outstrips the limits of the body." The connections (and differences) between this and the discussion of Cavendish are salient rather than distinct. Nevertheless, Ms. Thell's account of the New Voyage—deftly woven in places with other key texts—produces an engaging discussion of the possibilities and perilous unreliability of subjective travel writing. Defoe creates "blank personae" who effectively serve as "avatars"; through them, readers can hear multiple viewpoints telling the same story, but from different perspectives. This parallel with "virtual experience," theories of which are perhaps insufficiently established here, anticipates Kames's later notion of "ideal presence," a touchstone at subsequent points. The notion of multiple perspectives in the single travel text adopts new angles in Hawkesworth's Account of the Voyages … (1773), based on the journals of several participants in Captain Cook's Pacific explorations. Nascent concerns touched on in previous chapters about the novelistic narrativization of a supposedly objective travel account were more urgent by the time Hawkesworth undertook his commission. As his preface demonstrates, he was self-consciously aware of the potentially contentious choice to adopt a first-person voice to narrate experiences he did not [End Page 111] have himself, bringing fresh pertinence to Kames's concept of ideal presence. Hawkesworth exposed the "literary" qualities of his own account "as purely rhetorical constructs," and so compelled readers "to acknowledge that even within the domain of navigational writing certain guarantees of credibility serve aesthetic as well as epistemological functions." The negative furor following its publication...