The article focuses on three early-seventeenth-century (English and Scottish)
leisure travelers’ accounts of the (alleged) ruins of Homeric Troy, namely those
penned by Thomas Coryat, William Lithgow, and George Sandys. It argues that
their rumination on the specific remains both shaped and reflected their manifold,
fractured, and precarious identities while it also highlighted the complex
dialogue taking place in these texts between a ruinous past and a fragmented and
malleable present. The essay also examines the three travelers’ broken poetics,
interspersed in the aforementioned accounts, and shows that they constitute
highly self-aggrandizing narratives through which their authors perform their
fragile identities.
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