Bibliograph

African impressions, how African worldviews shaped the British geographical imagination across the early Enlightenment, Rebekah Mitsein

Type

Label

African impressions, how African worldviews shaped the British geographical imagination across the early Enlightenment, Rebekah Mitsein

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references and index

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

African impressions

Nature of contents

bibliography

Responsibility statement

Rebekah Mitsein

Series statement

Winner of the Walker Cowen memorial prize

Sub title

how African worldviews shaped the British geographical imagination across the early Enlightenment

Summary

"In African Impressions in British Literature, Rebecca Mitsein considers the ways that African self-representation continued to drive European impressions of the continent across the early Enlightenment, fueling desires to find the sources of West Africa's gold and the city states along the Niger, to establish a relationship with the Christian Kingdom of Prester John, and to discover the source of the Nile. Through an analysis of a range of genres, including travel narratives, geography books, maps, verse, and fiction, Rebekah Mitsein shows how African strategies of self-representation and European strategies for representing Africa grew increasingly entangled as the ideas that Africans projected about themselves and their worlds migrated from contact zones to texts and back again. The geographical narratives that arose from this reiterative cycle, which unfolded over hundreds of years, were often highly imaginary and appropriated to expansionist ends but remained tethered to the African worlds and worldviews that shaped them"--, Provided by publisher

Table Of Contents

Introduction -- "Wherein the Blacke-Prince Keepes His Residence, Attended by His Jetty Coloured Traine": Impressions of the Western Sudan, 1324-1620 -- "A Country of Blacks So Called": The Romance of African Impressions in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko -- "A Medium of an Endless Correspondence": Rivers for Want of Empires in the African Impressions of Daniel Defoe's Captain Singleton and Atlas Maritimus and Commercialis -- "Where the Nile Riseth . . . Where the Queen of Saba Lived": Impressions of Abyssinia, 1327-1759 -- "Between the Inland Countries of Africk and the Ports of the Red Sea": African Impressions amid Fact and Fancy in Samuel Johnson's Rasselas "Descended from the Queen of Saba": African Women as Geographical Authorities in James Bruce's Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile -- Coda

Classification