Travel literature

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Travel literature is travel writing considered to have value as literature. Travel literature typically records the people, events, sights and feelings of an author who is touring a foreign place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary.

To be called literature the work must have a coherent narrative, or insights and value, beyond a mere logging of dates and events, such as diary or ship's log. Literature that recounts adventure, exploration and conquest is often grouped under travel literature, but it also has its own genre outdoor literature; these genres will often overlap with no definite boundaries. This article focuses on literature that is more akin to tourism.

History

One of the earliest known records of taking pleasure in travel, of travelling for the sake of travel and writing about it, is Petrarch's (1304–1374) ascent of Mount Ventoux in 1336. He states that he went to the mountaintop for the pleasure of seeing the top of the famous height. His companions who stayed at the bottom he called frigida incuriositas ("a cold lack of curiosity"). He then wrote about his climb, making allegorical comparisons between climbing the mountain and his own moral progress in life.

Michault Taillement, a poet for the Duke of Burgundy, travelled through the Jura Mountains in 1430 and left us with his personal reflections, his horrified reaction to the sheer rock faces, and the terrifying thunderous cascades of mountain streams. Antoine de la Sale (c. 1388–c. 1462), author of Petit Jehan de Saintre, climbed to the crater of a volcano in the Lipari Islands in 1407, leaving us with his impressions. "Councils of mad youth" were his stated reasons for going. In the mid 15th century, Gilles le Bouvier, in his Livre de la description des pays, gave us his reason to travel and write:

Because many people of diverse nations and countries delight and take pleasure, as I have done in times past, in seeing the world and things therein, and also because many wish to know without going there, and others wish to see, go, and travel, I have begun this little book.

In 1589, Richard Hakluyt (c. 1552–1616) published Voyages, a foundational text of the travel literature genre.

Other later examples of travel literature include accounts of the Grand Tour. Aristocrats, clergy, and others with money and leisure time travelled Europe to learn about the art and architecture of its past. One tourism literature pioneer was Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894).

Travel literature also became popular during the Song Dynasty (960–1279) of medieval China.[1] The genre was called 'travel record literature' (youji wenxue), and was often written in narrative, prose, essay and diary style.[2] Travel literature authors such as Fan Chengda (1126–1193) and Xu Xiake (1587–1641) incorporated a wealth of geographical and topographical information into their writing, while the 'daytrip essay' Record of Stone Bell Mountain by the noted poet and statesman Su Shi (1037–1101) presented a philosophical and moral argument as its central purpose.[3]

In the 18th century, travel literature was commonly known as the book of travels, which mainly consisted of maritime diaries.[4] In 18th century England, almost every famous writer worked in the travel literature form.[5] Captain James Cook's diaries (1784) were the equivalent of today's best sellers.

Travel guides

Main article: Guide book

Travel literature is not to be confused with travel guides, usually a series put out by a publisher, each dealing with a particular country, city or region. These are useful for travellers, as they provide a wealth of information on hotels, restaurants, major sights, travel tips etc. The writers are often specialists who travel and write these books for a living.

Types of travelogues

Some travel writers are people who travel and make their livings by writing about it. The Americans William Least Heat-Moon (b. 1940) and Paul Theroux (b. 1941), the Welsh author Jan Morris (b. 1926) and the Englishman Eric Newby (1919–2006) come to mind, although Morris is also known as an historian and Theroux as a novelist.

There is a point, too, in which travel literature intersects with essay writing, as in V. S. Naipaul's India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), where a trip becomes the occasion for extended observations on a nation and people. Rebecca West's (1892–1983) work on Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) is another example.

Travel and nature writing merge in many of the works of Sally Carrighar (1895–1985), Ivan T. Sanderson (1911–1973) and Gerald Durrell (1925–1995). These authors are naturalists who write to support their great passion. Both Durrell and Sanderson can be quite funny. Charles Darwin (1809–1882) 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 (1709–1784), Charles Dickens (1812–1870), Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), Rebecca West (1892–1983), John Steinbeck (1902–1968) and Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966).

Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or it may involve travel to different regions within the same country. Accounts of spaceflight may also be considered as travel literature.

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 (1321), Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), or Voltaire's Candide (1759), Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (1759) – nevertheless contain factual elements.

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.

Encouraged by these pioneering studies, buoyed by the popularity of Foucauldian criticism, galvanized by Edward Said's postcolonial landmark Orientalism (1978), and fueled by a growing interdisciplinary preoccupation with cultural diversity, globalization, and migration, the study of travel writing was burgeoning in the late 1990s. 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 from around the world and led to the foundation of the International Society of Travel and Travel Writing (ISTW). The same year saw the first issue of Studies in Travel Writing, a journal edited by Tim Youngs, director of the Notthingham Trent Centre for Travel Writing Studies. Annual scholarly conferences about travel writing after 1997, both in the U.S. and in Europe, led to a sustained growth of the field and a rapid expansion of the publication list of monographs and essay collections dealing with travel literature, and 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).

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

See also

References

  1. ^ Hargett, 67
  2. ^ Hargett, 67–93.
  3. ^ Hargett, 74–76.
  4. ^ Stolley, 26.
  5. ^ Fussell, 54.
  • Batten, Charles Lynn, Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth Century Travel Literature (1978)
  • 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)

External links

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