The mysterious and the foreign in early modern England
By: edited by Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck.
Contributors: Ostovich, Helen.; Silcox, Mary V.; Roebuck, Graham.
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Newark
Language: eng
Number of pages: 318
ISBN-13: 9780874139549
Subjects: English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism; Exoticism in literature; Foreign countries in literature; Curiosities and wonders in literature; Supernatural in literature; Travel in literature; Other (Philosophy) in literature; Difference (Philosophy) in literature; Travelers' writings, English -- History and criticism
Description: "The essays collected in this volume explore many of the most interesting, and some of the more surprising, reactions of English people in the early modern period to their encounters with the mysterious and the foreign. In this period the small and peripheral nation of English speakers first explored the distant world from the Arctic, to the tropics of the Americas, to the exotic East, and snowy wastes of Russia, recording its impressions and adventures in an equally wide variety of literary genres. Nearer home, fresh encounters with the mysterious world of the Ottoman Empire and the lure of the Holy Land, and, of course, with the evocative wonders of Italy, provide equally rich accounts for the consumption of a reading and theatergoing public.

This growing public proved to be, in some cases, naive and gullible, in others urbanely sophisticated in its reactions to "otherness," or frankly incredulous of travelers' tales."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.