The idea of this collection first arose in the course of a research seminar I conducted at the École Normale Supérieure, Lyon, France, between the spring of 2003 and that of 2006, a seminar which ENS-Éditions very rapidly chose to publish as a book. It then took its final, international form during the conference on ‘Unstable Zones: Self and Other in British Narratives of Exploration’ which I convened at the ENS in March 2007. The carefully selected, heavily revised essays presented here are not focused on ‘travel narratives’ as a literary genre or as emblems of a ‘tourist’ culture, two fields of research which have been substantially dealt with in recent years. Nor do we attempt to define the characteristic features of a genre in relation to other genres – such as the pilgrimage narrative – or to employ the historian's method of examining the great projects of territorial expansion and the effects of a continued relationship with the foreign. This is a book on exploration, and more precisely on exploration narratives written by British explorers on their return from ‘contact zones’, understood here not as predetermined spaces where Self and Other come to meet on fixed grounds, but as ‘social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other’.

As a consequence, the essays collected in this volume deal mainly with accounts of first encounters, focusing on the pragmatic aspects of communication between Self and Other, from the medieval and Renaissance period to the late nineteenth century, in North or South America, in Asia as well as in Africa, from the South Pacific to the Antarctic; from Mandeville, Drake and Ralegh to Franklin, Stanley and Burton. The main objective is to scrutinize what has hitherto been ignored; namely, the precise moment of mutual discovery experienced in the field, as recorded by the Western observer, the one participant to the scene supposed to have known how to write about this shared experience – a practice traditionally assumed to signal the ‘Great Divide’ between oral and literate cultures, pre-logical and logical systems of thought, pre-capitalist and capitalist economies, non-ethical and ethical social organizations.