“The southern unknown countries”: Imagining the Pacific in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

British enthusiasm for Pacific exploration persisted after the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in the autumn of 1720. Taken together, several works of fiction of the 1720s such as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Daniel Defoe's Captain Singleton and A New Voyage Round the World, supplement traditional histories of the novel by making problematic the ways in which early eighteenth-century fiction became entangled with visions of the South Seas as a crucial theater for expanding Britain's economic and naval power. These works proved crucial in structuring both the wishful thinking that motivated British voyages to the Pacific and the satiric skepticism that these unrealistic expectations provoked. Gulliver's trip to Japan represents a telling disruption of Eurocentric discourses of imperialism, techno-military supremacy, and religious authority. Given England's fascination with the Pacific in the wake of James Cook's voyages, the Southern unknown Countries were the early locations of its transformation into an arena of colonial conflict.