Fictions of Encounter: Eighteenth-Century Imaginary Voyages to the Antipodes

The “imaginary voyage” was an early form of the modern realist novel popular in Britain and France from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, set predominantly in the region of Australasia and the Pacific. As a branch of travel literature, it was linked intimately to the expansion of empire. Through repeated stories of successful colonizing schemes and heroic accounts of cross-cultural encounters between European travelers and the people of the antipodes, these texts allowed European readers to enjoy far-fetched fantasies of colonization well before, and during, the period of actual colonial expansion. As in the case of the many better-known examples of literary fiction produced in the later period of European imperial dominance, imaginary voyage fiction helped embed social acceptance of colonial expansion by modeling cultural domination as natural, beneficial, and welcome. Surprisingly, the genre continued to thrive when documentary accounts of actual voyages to the antipodes began to emerge. Now, however, the imaginary voyage receives little attention, and has all but disappeared from public awareness. This essay describes and explores some key aspects of this long-neglected genre, with the aim of showing that it played a more important role both in terms of literary history and in the history of colonization itself than has hitherto been recognized. More specifically, its deliberate exploitation of the shifting boundaries between reality and fantasy casts light on the development of literary realism and especially on the uneasy relationship between fact and fiction that continues to challenge historians and literary critics to this day. Intrinsically linked to this blurring of boundaries was the role of this forgotten genre in the shaping of the colonial imagination.¹

Typically, imaginary voyages are both utopian in their visions of fictional worlds and written in a satirical style that allows veiled attacks on contemporary political figures and practices. Critics trace the genre’s origins to forms of literary romance and utopian projection. Although its status as a prototype for the modern realist novel and precursor to the genres of science fiction and fantasy are well recognized, the genre has generally been marginalized or overlooked, mainly on the grounds that the imaginary voyage texts had limited truth value when compared with contemporary accounts of genuine travels. On this basis, the imaginary voyage was seen mainly as a fanciful precursor to documentaries of travel, and as having been displaced by them. But there was another reason, I would suggest, for the lack of critical attention. In terms of genre, imaginary voyages fell between two stools: representing neither history nor romance but a strange marriage of the two. Imaginary voyages reflected and exploited a particular moment in the history of maritime exploration when the edges of the known world were being extended and the public was eager to suspend belief and be part of the process of discovery. When that moment passed, imaginary voyages lost the connection with real history that had served them so well, but had not developed a sufficiently strong identity purely as fiction to claim lasting critical recognition.² In retrospect, however, the imaginary voyage genre can be seen as a significant link in the chain of a long tradition, stretching back to very early forms of fictional narrative and forward to the later writers who traveled in their minds to the depths of the sea, to the interior of the earth, to other planets, and to the future. Today most of the writings that form this body of work are almost completely unknown.

This essay begins by discussing the colonialist themes and common textual strategies employed by writers of eighteenth-century accounts of imaginary voyages, especially those set in the region of the “antipodes.” This is followed by a detailed investigation of the social and literary contexts in which these works were published and received by a reading public eager to learn of newly discovered lands. The focus in the following pages is not on specific examples of imaginary voyage accounts but rather on the genre and on the genre’s peculiarly close relationship with genuine eighteenth-century accounts of voyages of discovery.^3...