Borge, Francisco J. 2007: A New World for a New Nation: The Promotion of America in Early Modern England.(Book review)

Francisco J. Borge 2007: A New World for a New Nation: The Promotion of America in Early Modern England. Bern: Peter Lang. 234 pp + 4 plates. ISSN 1661-4720. ISBN 978-3-03911-070-4

Until the 1980s, the countless reports, logs, narratives, letters, classical odes, directions to travellers, instructions for colonists, guidebooks, sermons and autobiographical pot-boilers produced by mariners and merchants, adventurers and ambassadors, gentlemen rakes down on their luck, Puritans seeking the promised land, aristocrats seeking fool's gold, paid hacks, penniless humanists, disgruntled settlers, tavern bores and oddballs with itchy feet between, say, 1500 and 1650 were textual regions that barely existed on the map of the literary canon and remained largely untrodden except by colonial or maritime historians and amateur antiquarians. But since the 1980s, "[s]tudies of travel writing, colonialism, and post-colonialism have moved from a virtually invisible periphery to the very centre of the humanities" (Hadfield 2001: ix). This sea change is due to a combination of factors: the postmodern expansion of the academic discipline of English Literature into Cultural Studies; the prevailing reverence for the politics of difference; the happy--in some ways inevitable--marriage between travel writing and postcolonial theory; and, as far as travel writing of the New World is concerned, the kick-start provided by the American Bicentenary of 1976 and the availability of a sound historical bedrock thanks to the sterling editorial and historiographical labours of a group of scholars during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, chief among them David Beers Quinn, generously cited in the book under review. Among the welter of scholarship, perhaps the two works which have most shaped the dominant theoretical approaches to early modern travel writing are Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) and Stephen Greenblatt's essay 'Invisible Bullets' (1989). The former argued famously that Western thought and writing from the late eighteenth-century has been constructed upon and over the ideologically driven postulation of the existentially spurious barbarism of the East. Orientalism's insights into the ways cultures perceive each other and define themselves in terms of perceived otherness and difference, and the theoretical development of those insights in Tzvetan Todorov's The Conquest of America (1984) and Michel de Certeau's Heterologies (1986), have fuelled countless studies of travel writing (whether of the Orient, the Old World or the New) that have followed in its wake. At the same time, its implication that writing about the other is in fact writing about the self fits in nicely with the self-reflexivity of travel writing that, largely since Greenblatt, has been endlessly revealed by new …