Anne M. Thell contends that eighteenth-century travel writing is a primary site where authors and readers test emerging models of empiricism while simultaneously seeking out the role of the self and the imagination in the production of legitimate knowledge. Travel literature thus operates at the front line of the period's intellectual developments, illustrating both how individual writers grapple with philosophical ideals and how these ideals filter into the lives of ordinary people. Taken together, travelogues as diverse as Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World (1666) and Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) reveal the epistemological circuitry of the eighteenth century and historicize the absorption of the philosophical tendencies that have come to define modernity.

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