Critical Works on European Exploration Writing: A Conceptual Review

Abstract

The major point in this paper is that exploration narratives are literary artifacts, rather than non-literary documentary sources of history or anthropology; and that literary theorists and cultural historians should nowabandon the unhelpful and outdated conception of literature as designating only a "privileged set of fictional, imaginative and creative forms of writing which... exhibit certain specific properties that require special methods of analysis if they are to be understood''. Rather, Literature should be understood as a field marked by a variety of textualizations, by specific practices of writing to the extent that the distinction between, say, genres and forms, logics and practices of writing becomes an institutional rather than an aesthetic or a literary one.


(Humanities Review Journal: 2002 2(2): 57-70)