Foigny's Terra Incognita Australis. Discovering a new land, building up the novel genre

EL DESARROLLO DE LA NOVELA

Abstract

From the late fifteenth century to the seventeenth century, travellers from different European countries tried to reach an unknown southern continent supposedly situated somewhere between the African and American lands. One of the most popular accounts dealing with this continent produced in England in the late seventeenth century was Gabriel de Foigny’s A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis, or the Southern World, published in 1693 by John Dunton, and, in fact, a translation from the 1692 French version. Although this piece of early prose fiction in English has been recorded by several scholars, little critical work has been done on the English version. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to bring to the light the relevance of this novel by, on the one hand, considering this fictional work within the tradition of both travel literature and utopian novels in seventeenth-century England and, on the other, exploring those elements in the story that may have contributed to the establishment of the budding genre of the novel.