| Summary: | This thesis uses critical reading techniques to approach Richard Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1598-1600), a collection of voyage narratives and other documents. Although many different forms of travel writing are reproduced in the collection, there is evidence of only sporadic efforts having been taken to try to integrate these elements into a unified, coherent narrative. This thesis therefore argues that, in spite of the influences of its framing paratext and of a tradition of reading it through the filter of its editor's apparent ideological commitments, there is much to be gained from approaching The Principal Navigations as a complex, unresolved and polyphonic text.
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