Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Din-Kariuki, Natalya

Titel

Tediousness in Coryats Crudities (1611): early modern travel writing, rhetoric, and notions of canonicity

Ist Teil von

• Textual practice, 2024-02, Vol.38 (2), p.318-336

Ort / Verlag

Abindgon: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Taylor & Francis Journals Auto-Holdings Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Despite its increasing prominence in university syllabi and anthologies, travel writing continues to be excluded from the canon of early modern literature. Its exclusion can be attributed to the view, articulated explicitly and implicitly, that its formal and stylistic conventions render it insufficiently 'literary'. Such assessments reveal a tendency to read early modern travel accounts using aesthetic criteria that are anachronistic, disconnected from the discursive contexts in which these accounts were originally written and read. This article examines one of the genre's most distinctive features, one which has shaped its relationship to notions of literary value and canonicity: its preoccupation with particulars, something early modern and modern readers alike characterise as 'tedious'. Focusing on Thomas Coryate's eponymous Coryats Crudities (1611), it situates the particularity of early modern travel writing within the reconstructed contexts of classical rhetoric, early modern poetics, and travel advice, placing special emphasis on the rhetorical quality of enargeia, or vividness. In addition to offering a fresh assessment of the Crudities and modelling a new approach to the study of travel writing more generally, the article reflects on how we can expand our sense of what early modern literature might be said to comprise.