Travelling and Mapping the World.Scientific Discoveries and Narrative Discourses

Travelling and Mapping the World: Scientific Discoveries and Narrative Discourses investigates the interfacing between the development of scientific discourses and the re-configuration of old paradigms of knowledge both in literature and science that started in Europe in the age of the Great Discoveries and continued throughout the 17th and the 18th century. The book brings together various disciplinary areas, and a variety of scientific terms of reference, as well as points of observation from several European contexts. At the centre of the volume is travel literature, a genre of a hybrid kind from its very beginnings, of somewhat indefinite contours. It has been for centuries at the interface of fields of knowledge and disciplines such as cartography, cosmogony, astronomy, physics, zoology, ethnology, and ethology, and also the history of medicine and pharmacology. But travel literature, as the essays in this book demonstrate, was and still is a fertile field of enquiry for theoreticians, philosophers, anthropologists and historians of ideas in which to trace the history of paradigms and Western culture’s founding cognitive categories such as gender, identity, otherness, race and ethnicity. The traveller confirms, through his ‘eclectic’ knowledge, that the geographical discoveries and the possession of territories are inseparably linked to the emergence of a new science. The accounts of voyages become an important reference point to monitor the developments and the progress of scientific competence in the areas of physics, astronomy, geography and the science of navigation. Compasses, lenses, marine chronometers, deforming mirrors and other objects become the new symbols of a poetic language that draws on nature, but also and above all on scientific knowledge and experience.