Travel Writing/Writing Travel to Report: Matthew Flinders to Evan Nepean from Coepang Bay Timor
Travel Writing/Writing Travel to Report: Matthew Flinders to Evan Nepean from Coepang Bay Timor
Author(s): Polina ShvanyukovaSubject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Literary Texts, Theory of Literature
Published by: Великотърновски университет „Св. св. Кирил и Методий”
Keywords: maritime exploration; Pacific; travel; scientific travel writing; epistolary travel writing; official correspondence; Matthew Flinders
Summary/Abstract: Texts authored by maritime explorers occupy a special place in the body of travel literature in English dealing with the exploration of the Pacific in the modern period. This article focuses on a specimen of scientific travel writing in epistolary form authored by Commander Matthew Flinders, the officer under whose command HMS Investigator completed the first circumnavigation of Australia in 1803. I analyse Matthew Flinders’s official despatch to Evan Nepean, Secretary of the Admiralty at the time, as an example of early nineteenth-century epistolary travel writing, paying special attention to the textual strategies employed by Flinders in order to produce a coherent and accurate travel account, on the one hand, and to negotiate his professional status and persona with his interlocutor(s), on the other.
Journal: VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences
- Issue Year: 4/2020
- Issue No: 1
- Page Range: 32-41
- Page Count: 10
- Language: English