Lanterna Rally

Author: Darlene Farabee

Publisher: ProQuest

Published: 2008

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780549387688

Print Travels explores how metaphorical and actual descriptions of travel depict and shape early modern thinking and writing about movement. Changes in navigational methods, increases in circulation of travel literature, and advances in means of travel alter how early modern writers present movement. By integrating theories of metaphor with critical approaches to early modern literature, I argue that early modern systems of describing motion change the role of metaphor in the period. The first two chapters examine depictions of actual travel and changes in measurement associated with travel. Chapter one reads practical manuals of navigation and instructions for travelers and argues that the material descriptions of movement found in these texts have a decisive impact on the ways available to describe movement. Chapter two approaches Hakluyt's Principall Navigations as a singular but multi-voiced text. This chapter shows how disparities between the individual's perceptions of movement and larger-scale concerns of travel over greater distances opens the space for metaphoric descriptions to exist and change. The next three chapters examine metaphors and depictions of travel in more canonical texts. Chapter three reads the allegorical travel of Spenser's The Faerie Queene to examine how the characters describe their own movements and to explore the difficulties of translating navigational and mapping methods to a fictional world. Chapter four uses Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana and Donne's Azores poems to examine how these forms overlay meaning and movement on one another. This comparison allows an exploration of representation of movement and stasis. The final chapter explores questions of movement and stasis in staged depictions of travel in Thomas Heywood's plays. By examining Heywood's plays across the era, I argue that we can map changes in the ways that travel is represented on the stage. I argue that later Heywood plays report travel rather than represent travel on the stage, showing a change in the way that travel can function metaphorically. Print Travels traces changes in the metaphoric descriptions of travel and provides a new way of reading travel metaphors in early modern texts.