Browsing by Author "Kaislaniemi, Samuli"

This MA thesis looks at Early Modern English merchant letters as an atypical subgenre of travel literature, and as an underused source for European perceptions of the Other. The thesis approaches letters by applying the three-dimensional model developed for discourse analysis by Norman Fairclough. In this study, the letters are placed in their historical, cultural and textual contexts. I first analyse the letters in relation to contemporary travel literature and ethnography, and give an account of Early Modern merchant letter-writing. Then, I conduct a close reading of the letters in their historical context, focussing on the events and persons described. The primary sources for this study are taken from the correspondence of the English East India Company trading post in Japan, 1613-1623. The texts studied are letters home (to England) written by ten different Company employees in Japan, about 50 in number. The texts are taken from the edition of the complete correspondence and other papers of the trading post (Anthony Farrington ed., "The English Factory in Japan 1613-1623", London: British Library, 1991). Although the papers of the trading post are quite unique, in containing the earliest accounts of the Far East written by secular Europeans, they have hitherto been largely neglected by scholars working on Early Modern travel. In the medieval and Early Modern periods, letters were seen to be a typical subgenre of travel literature. Yet merchant letters, being focussed on commerce, fell outside this categorisation. Any ethnographic descriptions of other cultures they contain can be taken to be incidental, and thus (relatively) unbiased. Yet descriptions of the Other found in merchant letters for the most part did not spread into the general consciousness. Merchant letters were usually not printed in published travel texts, and the East India Company was ultimately interested not in the collection of ethnographic information, but in trade.