A Need to Narrate? Early Modern French Accounts of Atlantic Crossings

Harrigan offers a new reading of processes of narrative transmission within the early modern Atlantic basin in a trajectory moving from the social, or human interactions, to the suprahuman, or perceptions of interactions with environment, the ocean and beyond. Through the analysis of four rarely-studied seventeenth-century narratives in French (François Pyrard, Guillaume Coppier, Antoine Biet and Jean Mongin), this chapter explores the generation of narrative through accelerated and collective human displacements and cultural disruptions, the narrative as a vector of new and familiar cultural capital, the text as repository for circulating narratives and popular rites and assesses the role of human agency within the anthropocentric ocean narrative.