ABSTRACT
Travel writing and narratives of exploration – writing about routes and about route making – have been widely scrutinized.1 Historians of science stress the importance of voyages of exploration and their printed narratives to the emergence of modern science.2 Geographers have studied the practices of printed inscription central to institutions facilitating travel, exploration and trade and scrutinized the epistemic practices of geographical writing.3 Book historians and others have shown the value of spatial and visual perspectives in understanding the making, distribution, and reading of printed texts.4 Literary scholars have reviewed the connections between narratives of travel, empire, ‘self ’ and ‘other’ and literary form.5 Taken together, these scholarly concerns show that engagement with narratives of exploration and travel writing is an important interdisciplinary endeavour.
