ABSTRACT
Before attempting to bridge the contextual disparity that obtained between himself and his reader, the traveller-writer needs to configure the reader's hermeneutic expectations. This chapter proposes that rhetoric enabled the genre to be established in terms of the ethical response demanded of the reader. It also proposes that the ethos fostered by modern travel literature, especially in its introductory matter and the captatio benevolentiae, allows to identify a wonderful genre, within which, as particular instances of wonder texts, our traveller-writers’ representations announce themselves as belonging. In short, the concern is with how a text may use rhetoric, above all various topical cues, to put the reader in contact with the experiential gestalt of wonder as a first step towards achieving consensual truth. There is the pervasive motif of cannibalism, which serves in travel literature as the ultimate acid test for civilization. There is the insistence on numerical precision (60 kings, quarters of mutton and human flesh, 77 elephants and unicorns).
