Pragmatic and rhetorical aspects, discursive modes and textual contaminations in 15th-17th century travel reports

Abstract

This paper investigates the textual aspects of odoeporic literature. The corpus of texts under scrutiny is rather heterogeneous and includes short as well as long reports of explorations, letters from exotic places, essays on social features of newly “discovered” peoples, within a time span ranging from the mid-1400s century to the end of the 17th century. The focus is on text types aimed at communicating both useful and entertaining facts; reported speech and the role of interpreters; the presence of the marvelous in travel reports; the vicissitudes of travelers, including shipwrecks.