Travel literature

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Travel literature is travel writing of literary value. Travel literature typically records the experiences of an author touring a place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary. Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or may involve travel to different regions within the same country. Accounts of spaceflight may also be considered travel literature.

Literary travelogues generally exhibit a coherent narrative or aesthetic beyond the logging of dates and events as found in travel diarys or a ship's log. Travel literature is closely associated with outdoor literature and the genres often overlap with no definite boundaries. Another sub-genre, dealing specifically with 20th and 21st century tourism, is the guide book.

Contents

[edit] Travelogues

The American William Least Heat-Moon, Welsh author Jan Morris and Englishman Eric Newby all made their livings writing travelogues, although Morris is also known as an historian and Theroux as a novelist. National Geographic Emerging Explorer and PEN award winning journalist Kira Salak first reached acclaim by traveling to the world's remotest locations and writing about them for National Geographic publications and travel books.

Travel literature often intersects with essay writing, as in V. S. Naipaul's India: A Wounded Civilization where a trip becomes the occasion for extended observations on a nation and people. This is similarly the case in Rebecca West's work on Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

Travel and nature writing merges in many of the works by Sally Carrighar, Ivan T. Sanderson and Gerald Durrell. These authors are naturalists who write in support of their fields of study. Charles Darwin wrote his famous account of the journey of HMS Beagle at the intersection of science, natural history and travel.

Literary travel writing also occurs when an author, famous in another field, travels and writes about his or her experiences. Examples of such writers are Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hilaire Belloc, D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, John Steinbeck

[edit] Fiction

Fictional travelogues make up a large proportion of travel literature. Although it may be desirable in some contexts to distinguish fictional from non-fictional works, such distinctions have proved notoriously difficult to make in practice, as in the famous instance of the travel writings of Marco Polo or John Mandeville. Many "fictional" works of travel literature are based on factual journeys – Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness), presumably Homer's Odyssey (c. 8th cent. BCE) – while other works, though based on imaginary and even highly fantastic journeys – Dante's Divine Comedy, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, or Voltaire's Candide, Samuel Johnson's Rasselas – nevertheless contain factual elements.

One prominent contemporary example of a real life journey transformed into a work of fiction is travel writer Kira Salak's novel The White Mary, which takes place in Papua New Guinea and the Congo and is largely based on her own experiences in those countries.[1][2][3]

[edit] Travel literature in criticism

The systematic study of travel literature emerged as a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry in the mid-1990s, with its own conferences, organizations, journals, monographs, anthologies, and encyclopedias. Among the most important pre-1995 monographs are: Abroad (1980) by Paul Fussell, an exploration of British interwar travel writing as escapism; Gone Primitive: Modern Intellects, Savage Minds (1990) by Marianna Torgovnick, an inquiry into the primitivist presentation of foreign cultures; Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (1991) by Dennis Porter, a close look at the psychological correlatives of travel; Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing by Sara Mills, an inquiry into the intersection of gender and colonialism during the nineteenth century; Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), Mary Louise Pratt's influential study of Victorian travel writing’s dissemination of a colonial mind-set; and Belated Travelers (1994) an analysis of colonial anxiety by Ali Behdad.

The study of travel writing developed most extensively in the late 1990s, encouraged by the currency of Foucauldian criticism and Edward Said's postcolonial landmark study Orientalism. This growing interdisciplinary preoccupation with cultural diversity, globalization, and migration is expressed in other fields of literary study, most notably Comparative Literature. The first international travel writing conference, “Snapshots from Abroad,” organized by Donald Ross at the University of Minnesota in 1997, attracted over one hundred scholars and led to the foundation of the International Society of Travel and Travel Writing (ISTW). The first issue of Studies in Travel Writing was published the same year, edited by Tim Youngs. Annual scholarly conferences about travel writing, held in the USA, Europe, and Asia saw an unprecedented upswing in the number of published travel literature monographs and essay collections, as well as a proliferation of travel writing anthologies.

Major directions in recent travel writing scholarship include: studies about the role of gender in travel and travel writing (e.g. Women Travelers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze [1998] by Indira Ghose); explorations of the political functions of travel (e.g. Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s [2001] by Bernard Schweizer); postcolonial perspectives on travel (e.g. English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (2000) by Barbara Korte); and studies about the function of language in travel and travel writing (e.g. Across the Lines: Travel, Language, and Translation [2000] by Michael Cronin). Tim Youngs is a driving force behind the growth of the field, notably through the journal Studies in Travel Writing, through his two co-edited volumes of essays on travel writing, Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (2002), co-edited with T. Hulme, and Perspectives in Travel Writing (2004), co-edited with G. Hooper; Youngs also co-organized the 2005 travel writing conference, “Mobilis in Mobile,” in Hong Kong. Kristi Siegel is another prolific editor of travel writing scholarship, having edited Issues in Travel Writing: Empire, Spectacle and Displacement (2002) as well as Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing (2004).

[edit] Notable travel writers and travel literature

See outdoor literature for adventure/exploration/nature literature.

The Royal Road to Romance, The Flying Carpet, New Worlds to Conquer, The Glorious Adventure, Seven League Boots

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b ""National Geographic Adventure" review of "The White Mary""]. http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/2008/08/kira-salak/michael-finkel-text. 
  2. ^ ""Wall Street Journal" review of "The White Mary""]. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121702303930685891.html?mod=2_1167_1. 
  3. ^ "Amazon.com listing for "The White Mary"". http://www.amazon.com/White-Mary-Novel-Kira-Salak/dp/0805088474/ref=pd_cp_b_1?pf_rd_p=413864201&pf_rd_s=center-41&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0792274172&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1M95AY2JPH8GVAZHDZ1M. 
  • Batten, Charles Lynn, Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth Century Travel Literature (1978)
  • Chatzipanagioti, Julia: Griechenland, Zypern, Balkan und Levante. Eine kommentierte Bibliographie der Reiseliteratur des 18. Jahrhunderts. 2 Vol. Eutin 2006. ISBN 3981067428
  • Speake, Jennifer (2003), ed. Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia. 3 vol. [N.p.]: Routledge. ISBN 1-57958-247-8.
  • Stolley, Karen. El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes: un itinerario crítico. Ediciones del Norte. (1992)
  • Fussell, Paul Jr. "Patrick Brydone: The Eighteenth-Century Traveler as Representative Man." Literature as a Mode of Travel. New York Public Library Bulletin. (1963)

[edit] External links

Sister project Look up itinerary in
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Sister project Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Travel literature


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