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Reading the Ottoman Empire : intertextuality and experience in Henry Blount’s Voyage into the Levant (1636)
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Din-Kariuki, Natalya (2023) Reading the Ottoman Empire : intertextuality and experience in Henry Blount’s Voyage into the Levant (1636). Review of English Studies, 74 (313). pp. 47-63. doi:10.1093/res/hgac062 ISSN 0034-6551.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/res/hgac062
Abstract
The English traveller Henry Blount (1602-1682), author of A Voyage into the Levant (1636), is renowned for attempting to view the Ottoman Empire with an open mind and to understand it on its own terms. Scholars of the Voyage have examined Blount’s attitude to cultural difference, as well as his relationship to emerging discourses of empiricism, especially the works of Francis Bacon. This essay argues that the cultural politics and philosophical outlook of the Voyage are fundamentally connected to, and, in some cases, problematised by, Blount’s intertextual strategies. It shows that Blount’s digestion of his reading shapes his theoretical approach to travel, including his understanding of perception, cognition, and experience, and is central to his description of the Ottoman Empire. As well as identifying Blount’s borrowings from and paraphrases of writings by Bacon, Michel de Montaigne, George Sandys, and, indirectly, Aristotle, my argument demonstrates that early modern travel writing offers an especially striking example of the parallels between observation and reading that characterise the writings of the period more generally.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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Subjects: | D History General and Old World > D History (General) D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D901 Europe (General) D History General and Old World > DS Asia |
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Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Voyages and travels -- Early works to 1800, Cultural relations, Empiricism, Turkey -- Description and travel, Turkey -- History -- Ottoman Empire, 1288-1918 | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Review of English Studies | ||||||||
Publisher: | Oxford University Press | ||||||||
ISSN: | 0034-6551 | ||||||||
Official Date: | February 2023 | ||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 74 | ||||||||
Number: | 313 | ||||||||
Number of Pages: | 17 | ||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 47-63 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.1093/res/hgac062 | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 12 September 2022 | ||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 4 October 2022 |
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