William Bartram Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Pamela Regis

Critical Essay by Pamela Regis

SOURCE: Regis, Pamela. “Description and Narration in Bartram's Travels.” In Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson, Crèvecoeur, and the Rhetoric of Natural History, pp. 40-78. Northern Illinois University Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Regis examines Bartram's use of narrative as a mode for employing two different description techniques for the external world.

As an instance of the literature of place, William Bartram's Travels represents large portions of the territories of North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida to readers eager for images of the New World they had never seen. Using the rhetoric and method of natural history, Bartram details “the furniture of the earth” to be found in these regions—the minerals and animals and, in particular, the plants. Using Edmund Burke's theory of the sublime and the beautiful, he describes the scenes through which he sailed, paddled, rode, and walked during his three-and-a-half-year journey through the Southeast. The two...
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