Teaching English Travel Writing from 1500 to the Present

Abstract

English travel writing in the early modern period is full of cross-cultural encounters, and the study of that literature today also involves a complex set of cross-cultural negotiations. Our job, as teachers, is to facilitate those negotiations by introducing students to the pleasures of exploring early modern literature, and by giving them the tools they need to effectively contextualize their encounters with the past. In this essay, I address some of the difficulties and delights of teaching early modern cross-cultural encounters in the context of an undergraduate survey of English travel writing from 1500 to the present. Survey courses present a predictable set of challenges when it comes to teaching cross-cultural encounters in early modern literature—not least the need to historicize, in a very concise way, those encounters—but they can also be richly rewarding to both teachers and students. They present us, for example, with unique opportunities to explore how writers respond, at different times, to changing literary and cultural contexts. And they also offer the opportunity to think not just about cross-cultural encounters that occur within literary texts, but also those that might occur between or among texts, and between ourselves (as readers) and the early modern texts we are studying.