Eco-Narrative and Self-Expression in Medieval European Travel Writing: Marco Polo, John Mandeville, Margery Kempe, and Felix Fabri

This thesis explores the interplay between eco-narrative and writing of the self in the four travelogues, respectively by Polo, Mandeville, Kempe, and Fabri. It investigates how “nature writing” reflects human performance of the selfhood, as well as how nature constitutes the status of personhood embodied in the four texts, hence delving into the rhetorical and cognitive mechanisms of medieval human writing of the nonhuman.