ABSTRACT
Not surprisingly, travel writing came to be considered as subversive and suspect, for it hampered - even hindered - the attempts of emerging nation-states to find 'closure around one dominant cartography of meaning and power.' In writing intelligible representations, the traveller-writer is not only helping in the joint meaning-making process, but also helping to shield himself from charges of sociocultural non-conformity. The power of affective rhetoric to trigger appropriate emotional responses, to bridge contextual disparities by means of the creation of empathy within the framework of the ‘wonder gestalf, is a representational strategy that many critics of Renaissance travel writing quite overlook, accustomed as they are to the more intellectual hermeneutic challenges offered, above all, by tropes and the figures of thought. One consequence of writing in terms of the already written is that it exposes the traveller-writer to the charge of plagiarism, as Swift's irony shows when Gulliver embarks on his account of the Struldbruggs.
