John Mandeville Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Mary B. Campbell

Critical Essay by Mary B. Campbell

SOURCE: "'The Other Half': Mandeville Naturalizes the East," in The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600. Cornell, 1988, pp. 122-61.

In the excerpt below, Campbell argues that Mandeville's Travels was a parody and an early precursor of the modern novel.

With Mandeville's Travels, the developing genre of travel literature in the West reaches a complicated and long-sustained climax. The book's popularity has been greater than that of any other prose work of the Middle Ages, and its practical effects farther reaching.¹ To investigate the reach and nature of its artistic effects, it will be necessary first to stand back and take the long view of the tributaries that feed it and the genre for which it helped carve a new bed.

Although his most important modern critic, Josephine Waters Bennett, calls Mandeville's book a "travel romance," that is precisely the term I hope to avoid in...
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