From Religious Pilgrimage to Planetary Traveling: A Cognitive Study of the History of English Travel Literature

Taking the history of English travel novels as the research object, this paper analyzes the relationship between the development of English travel literature and cognitive evolution from the perspectives of cognitive science theory, spatial theory and evolutionary theory, and constructs a set of cognitive evolution model throughout the history of English travel literature. This model reveals the deep relationship between the internal spatial representation of the text and human cognitive mechanism, and understands the evolution of the history of English travel novels as a cultural map from "embodied existence" to "cognitive evolution", covering embodied practice, social mind, psychological internalization and planetary scale expansion. By analyzing Canterbury Tales, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels and other works, this paper points out that travel novels not only record the cognitive changes of human beings in space, self and ‘other’, but also continuously push the boundary between literature and cultural thinking to the future, thus providing a new research path for understanding the dynamic relationship between literature and human cognitive system.