| Summary: | Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589 and 1598-1600) was an enormously influential work in the development of travel writing and a formative influence on early modern English identity. Hakluyt drew on and developed a previously European mode to create his compendium, and Principal Navigations is now considered the prime source for sixteenth-century English travel writing, often regarded historically as an objective record. By illuminating and reconstructing the politicised textual network of creators and influences which lay behind the text and analysing the effect they had on Hakluyt’s editorial techniques, this thesis offers a new understanding of the intricate and fluid negotiations which shaped English identity and English political and mercantile agency in the early modern period. The thesis is divided into six chapters, and thematically into two halves. The first three chapters establish the intellectual networks surrounding Hakluyt in order to place him within a wider societal context, connecting research on his personal history with textual analysis of his work. The subsequent three chapters focus more closely on the representation of specific regions in Principal Navigations, taking the Levant, Russia, and Newfoundland as case studies. Each chapter focuses on one of these geographic areas, and through textual and network analysis examines the effect which the community associated with the region had on Hakluyt’s treatment of material in Principal Navigations. These two sections work to place Hakluyt and his work within wider cultural and literary contexts. While scholarship has examined his editorial approach, this has generally been within the context of individual accounts. This thesis will perform the necessary critical step of expanding that analysis to consider the text as a whole, placing both Hakluyt and his work into context.
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