Distant Relations: Letters from America, 1492-1677

For all the renewed scrutiny of the texts of exploration and colonization over the last decades or so, critics, historians, and editors have paid surprisingly little attention to the forms these texts look. The general view, whether tacit or explicit, has been that since journals also narrate the experience of their authors there is no significant distinction among first-person travel narratives. Here, Sherman discusses some of the texts from America during the period of 1492 to 1677, which tend to be regarded now as part of a super-genre called "travel narratives" rather than as letters--or "journals," "itineraries," "discourses," "dialogues," and the other terms that brought with them, for Renaissance authors and audiences, specific generic conventions.