Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560-1613 (review)

Dr Sell's purpose in revising his Ph.D. thesis as a book is to look at the rhetoric underlying travel writing, not at the possible historical accuracy – or, as he puts it, real historical signified – of the images such writers try to purvey. His aim is to 'reinstate rhetoric as a viable means of communicating truths of a certain kind' (p. 16). He argues that the contemporary audience for these works could appreciate them only in the measure that they fitted into the cultural conceptual scheme of the community to which they were addressed. Without this they would not be intelligible. What the audience understood was necessarily mediated by the ingrained sense-perception in which they had been brought up. The author of a travel book therefore employs standard rhetorical topics and 'wonderful' commonplaces. In effect, rhetoric is the early and inflexible form of what is today promoted as creative writing, and its meaning was conveyed by tropes and long-established metaphors through which a community consensus had been established.

In aiming to stimulate wonder, therefore, Sell argues that the reports are at least one step removed from what, for want of a better term, one might call reality. They draw upon traditional ideas of such things as the relationship between the material and spiritual world, beliefs in the monstrous and expectations of finding Paradise. They worked within existing paradigms and protocols to exploit the affective power of rhetoric. They can be properly understood only when they are reviewed in the light of similar contemporary or earlier texts. Without these cues, the contemporary reader would not have been able to find the right interpretation of texts whose objectives were other than a simple representation of what the eye has seen. These unfamiliar sights were dangerous to the traveler. In the case of Arthur Barlowe and Edward Hayes, the authors were, he suggests, psychologically disturbed by their encounters with the wonderful.

For the others he examines in detail – Thomas Harriott, Sir Anthony Sherley on Shah Abbas, Walter Ralegh on Guiana and Edward Webbe on his life as a slave of the Turks – Sell locates them as part of a discourse that was contributing to the establishment of a national identity, and often as plagiarists who borrow their stories from others and who could have constructed their writing from their rhetorical material alone. Sell would not change his arguments if it were demonstrated that the voyages or adventures had never taken place since for him all travel writers were necessarily, if paradoxically, liars (as some of their contemporaries who sought morally to ostracized them had claimed at the time). Nevertheless, despite the discourse system within which they were obliged to work, he asserts that individuals could innovate and even overthrow ideologies (p. 31).

He is critical of recent scholarship on travel writings by Andrew Hadfield, Thomas Scanlan and Richard Helgerson which concentrate on the way that the accounts reflect on contemporary problems in Britain, because he sees rhetoric as more than a 'passive mouthpiece of power'. He claims to be elaborating the throw-away idea of Stephen Greenblatt on wonder but also to refine and improve on the studies of Greenblatt, Mary Fuller and Mary Campbell on wonder as a travel-writing trope. He is particularly critical of Campbell's interpretation of Ralegh as a man 'in the vanguard of modern subjectivity' (p. 15). To modify their ideas, he analyses the other rhetorical devices commonly used by travel writers of the period but largely unfamiliar today to focus our understanding on aspects of the genre that may have been more important to the writers' contemporaries. He thus attempts to dissociate himself from the approach of cultural materialists and the new historicists. The last two chapters of the book are designed to show that the writers became dissatisfied with metaphorical representation and shifted to the idea that their body was inscribed by their experience...