Writing Distant Travels and Linguistic Otherness in Early Modern England (C. 1550-1660): 2 (Polyglot Encounters in Early Modern Britain) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 250359963X ISBN 13: 9782503599632

Publisher: Brepols N.V., 2025

Synopsis

This volume explores the complexities and nuances of linguistic engagements with distant otherness in English texts from the mid-sixteenth century onward, when Britain was increasingly positioning itself as an Atlantic and global actor, causing translation and multilingualism to flourish in travel compendia, reports, diaries, humanist writing, and drama.

About this title

From the Back Cover

As Britain’s global interests expanded from the mid-sixteenth century, geographic mobility encouraged many forms of multilingual practices in English writings. Translations, lexical borrowings, and records of exchanges between travellers and far-off lands and peoples diversely registered, communicated, engaged and politicised encounters with alterity. Meanwhile, earlier continental European translations also influenced and complicated the reception of distant otherness, entailing questions of linguistic hybridity or pluralism.

This volume explores some of the practices and strategies underpinning polyglot encounters in travel accounts produced, translated, or read in England, as well as in artistic and educational materials inflected by those travels. Drawing on linguistic, lexicographic, literary, and historical methodologies, the twelve chapters in this volume collectively look into the contexts and significances of textual contact zones. Particular attention is paid to uses of multilingualism in processes of identity construction, defining and promoting national or imperial agendas, appropriating and assimilating foreign linguistic capital, or meeting resistance and limits from linguistic and cultural otherness refusing to lend itself to a subjected or go-between status. Treating of indigenous languages, newly anglicized words, and new artistic and instructional materials, the volume makes the case for the vibrancy and influence of early modern English engagements with polyglossia and the need for multiple scales of approach to – and interdisciplinary perspectives on – the subject.

Edition details

• Publisher: Brepols N.V.
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 250359963X
• ISBN 13: 9782503599632
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 277
• Editor: Houston Chloe, Lemercier-Goddard Sophie, Niayesh Ladan