Travel and Self-Description in Seventeenth-Century English Culture

Funded by the Academy of Finland, this project and located at the Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Arts Studies, this project explores descriptions of the self in seventeenth-century English travel accounts. It investigates the multiple ways in which travel accounts showed traces of the motivations and aims of individual travellers. Combining the analytical approaches and methodologies of life writing and cultural history of travel, this project expands the study of travel accounts, often looked at as productions of ‘knowledge’ about foreign lands, by turning the gaze to the ways in which they performed, recorded and accounted for individual experience. Travel accounts have been often viewed as efforts of strategic self-fashioning, but this project will approach these texts rather as repositories of personal, autobiographical information and as continuing projects of processual life-long writing. The individual case studies will look at both manuscript and printed travel accounts and writings from different social classes ranging from merchants and diplomats to more elite travellers.