Svět Literatury (May 2017)
Portugalští a španělští trosečníci 16. století a jejich vyprávění // Portuguese and Spanish castaways of the 16th century and their accounts
Abstract
The shipwreck accounts were written mainly by survivors of catastrophic shipwrecks on overseas voyages to America and India, and therefore belong to the huge corpus of works written in the 16th century about exploring and conquering new territories. Unlike the most of the written sources of the period, these accounts do not celebrate the overseas enterprise, they bring a new, tragic perspective and describe the dangers and misery of overseas voyages. The shipwreck accounts are often seen as a specific genre and can be studied from the perspective of travel narrative as well as from the perspective of autobiographical writing. There are many common motifs and elements in these accounts such as the physical transformation of the castaway, the interpretation of the shipwreck as a punishment, and the motive of time.
