Language and Myth: The Representation(s) of Sicily in Early Modern English Travelogues

The aim of my paper is to analyse the language of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English travelogues which describe Sicily and, at the same time, to highlight the “public” myth which characterised the Mediterranean island. The sixteen travelogues used for the present study cover a time spam of almost two hundred years, the first being Torkington (1518) and the last Veryard (1701), who visited Sicily in 1682. The period under investigation has been defined as “an era when the use of print as a medium for the dissemination of information was uncertain and fluid, and certain generic distinctions which we take for granted today – including that of ‘travel writing’ – were by no means clear or distinct” (Hadfield 1998: 1).