We are delighted to present the first talk in the Archives and Texts seminar, which will be held in Special Collections at the Museum of English Rural Life:
Monday 27th October (wk 5) 5-6pm, MERL
Dr Innes M. Keighren (Geography, Royal Holloway)
‘Travels in a publisher’s archive: John Murray and nineteenth-century travel publishing’
In this talk, Innes will present the findings of an AHRC-funded project which investigated the relationship between exploration and publishing in order better to understand how knowledge acquired in the field became, through a series of material and epistemic translations, knowledge on the page. In examining the transformation of travellers’ en route writing in journals and field notebooks into more-or-less polished print, Innes considers the significant role of editing, revising, and redacting in imposing order and authority on printed works of travel.
The lecture considers—with specific reference to accounts of travel in South America, Africa, and the Arctic issued by the leading nineteenth-century publishing house John Murray—how journeys of exploration became published accounts and how travellers sought to demonstrate the faithfulness of their written testimony and to secure their personal credibility.
All welcome – seasonal refreshments provided and we’ll have a drink afterwards.
