Background
Joshua Barnes was born on the 10th of January, 1654 in London, United Kingdom, the son of Edward Barnes, a merchant taylor.
Joshua Barnes was born on the 10th of January, 1654 in London, United Kingdom, the son of Edward Barnes, a merchant taylor.
Joshua Barnes attended the Emmanuel College and Christ's Hospital.
Joshua Barnes' work Gerania, a New Discovery of a Little Sort of People, anciently discoursed of, called Pygmies (1675) was an Utopian romance. Educated at Christ's Hospital and at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, he was in 1695 chosen Regius Professor of Greek, a language which he wrote and spoke with the utmost facility. One of his first publications was entitled Gerania.
Among his other works are a History of that Most Victorious Monarch Edward III (1688), an epic work numbering 900+ pages, in which he introduces long and elaborate speeches into the narrative. Editions of Euripides (1694) and of Homer (1711), also one of Anacreon (1705) which contains titles of Greek verses of his own which he hoped to publish.
Joshua Barnes was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in November, 1710. He died on 3 August 1712, at Hemingford, near St Ives, Huntingdonshire. Robert Ignatius Letellier considers Gerania, a work of prose fiction, to have been part of an emerging type of adventure novels.
A type featuring "the imaginary voyage into alien or fictional regions". They combined first-person adventure narratives with either "satirical social observation", or perceptions of ideal human behaviour in remote lands. A tradition routed in the Utopia (1516) of Thomas More, which found prominent manifestations in The Blazing World (1666) of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and The Isle of Pines of Henry Neville.
This tradition would lead to later works, such as the Robinson Crusoe (1719) of Daniel Defoe.
Royal Society.