Travel literature

The genre of travel literature includes adventure literature, exploration literature, guide book writing, nature writing, and outdoor literature, as well as accounts of visits to foreign countries.^[1]

The subgenre of travel journals, diaries, and direct records of a traveler's experiences dates back to Pausanias in the 2nd century AD and James Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1786).

History

Handwritten notes by Christopher Columbus on the Latin edition of Marco Polo's Il Milione.

Early examples of travel literature include Pausanias' Description of Greece in the 2nd century CE, the Journey Through Wales (1191) and Description of Wales (1194) by Gerald of Wales, and the travel journals of Ibn Jubayr (1145–1214) and Ibn Batutta (1304–1377), both of whom recorded their travels across the known world in detail. The travel genre was a fairly common genre in medieval Arabic literature.^[2]

Travel literature became popular during the Song Dynasty (960–1279) of medieval China.^[3] The genre was called 'travel record literature' (youji wenxue), and was often written in narrative, prose, essay and diary style.^[4] 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.^[5]

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 Taillevent, 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.^[6] 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.

In the 18th century, travel literature was commonly known as the book of travels, which mainly consisted of maritime diaries.^[7] In 18th century Britain, almost every famous writer worked in the travel literature form.^[8] Captain James Cook's diaries (1784) were the equivalent of today's best sellers.

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), with An Inland Voyage (1878), and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879) about his travels in the Cévennes, (France), is among the first popular books to present hiking and camping as recreational activities, and tells of commissioning one of the first sleeping bags.^[9] A very popular subgenre of travel literature started to emerge in the form of narratives of exploration, a still unexplored source for colonial and postcolonial studies.^[10]

Travel books

Travel books range in style from the documentary to the evocative, from literary to journalistic, and from the humorous to the serious. They are often associated with tourism and include guide books, meant to educate the reader about destinations, provide advice for visits, and inspire readers to travel. Travel writing may be found on web sites, in periodicals, and in books. It has been produced by a variety of writers, such as travelers, military officers, missionaries, explorers, scientists, pilgrims, social and physical scientists, educators, and migrants. Englishman Eric Newby, the Americans Bill Bryson, William Least Heat-Moon, and Paul Theroux, and Welsh author Jan Morris are or were widely acclaimed as travel writers, although Morris is also an historian and Theroux a novelist.

Travel literature often intersects with essay writing, as in V. S. Naipaul's India: A Wounded Civilization (1976), whose trip became 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 (1941).

Sometimes a writer will settle into a locality for an extended period, absorbing a sense of place while continuing to observe with a travel writer's sensibility. Examples of such writings include Lawrence Durrell's Bitter Lemons (1957), Deborah Tall's The Island of the White Cow (1986), and Peter Mayle's best-selling A Year in Provence (1989) and its sequels.

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

A number of writers famous in another field have written about their travel experiences. Examples are Samuel Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775); Charles Dickens' American Notes for General Circulation (1842); Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796); Hilaire Belloc's The Path To Rome (1902); D. H. Lawrence's Twilight in Italy and Other Essays (1916); Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays (1927); Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941); and John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962).

Adventure literature

In the world of sailing Joshua Slocum's Sailing Alone Around the World (1900) is a classic of outdoor adventure literature.^[11] In April 1895, Joshua Slocum set sail from Boston, Massachusetts and in Sailing Alone Around the World,^[12] he described his departure in the following manner:

I had resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895 was fair, at noon I weighed anchor, set sail, and filled away from Boston, where the Spray had been moored snugly all winter. […] A thrilling pulse beat high in me. My step was light on deck in the crisp air. I felt there could be no turning back, and that I was engaging in an adventure the meaning of which I thoroughly understood.

More than three years later, on June 27, 1898, Slocum returned to Newport, Rhode Island, having circumnavigated the world, a distance of more than 46,000 miles (74,000 km).

Guide books

Claife Station, built at one of Thomas West's 'viewing stations', to allow visiting tourists and artists to better appreciate the picturesque English Lake District.

A guide book or travel guide is "a book of information about a place, designed for the use of visitors or tourists".^[13] An early example is Thomas West's, guide to the Lake District published in 1778.^[14] Thomas West, an English clergyman, popularized the idea of walking for pleasure in his guide to the Lake District of 1778. In the introduction he wrote that he aimed:

to encourage the taste of visiting the lakes by furnishing the traveller with a Guide; and for that purpose, the writer has here collected and laid before him, all the select stations and points of view, noticed by those authors who have last made the tour of the lakes, verified by his own repeated observations.^[15]

To this end he included various 'stations' or viewpoints around the lakes, from which tourists would be encouraged to appreciate the views in terms of their aesthetic qualities.^[16] Published in 1778 the book was a major success.^[17]

It will usually include full details relating to accommodation, restaurants, transportation, and activities. Maps of varying detail and historical and cultural information are also often include. Different kinds of guide books exist, focusing on different aspects of travel, from adventure travel to relaxation, or aimed at travelers with different incomes, or focusing on sexual orientation or types of diet. Travel guides can also take the form of travel websites.

Travel journals

Goethe's Italian Journey between September 1786 and May 1788

A travel journal, also called road journal, is a record made by a traveller, sometimes in diary form, of the traveler's experiences, written during the course of the journey and later edited for publication. This is a long-established literary format; an early example is the writing of Pausanias (2nd century AD) who produced his Description of Greece based on his own observations. James Boswell published his The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides in 1786 and Goethe published his Italian Journey, based on diaries, in 1816. A more recent example is Che Guevara's The Motorcycle Diaries. A travelogue is a film, book written up from a travel diary, or illustrated talk describing the experiences of and places visited by traveller.^[18]

Fiction

Some fictional travel stories are related to 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. Examples of fictional works of travel literature based on actual journeys are:

• Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), which has its origin in an actual voyage Conrad made up the River Congo^[19]
• Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and The Dharma Bums (1958) are fictionalized accounts of his travels across the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s
• Travel writer Kira Salak's novel, The White Mary (2008), a contemporary example of a real life journey transformed into a work of fiction, which takes place in Papua New Guinea and the Congo.^[20][21][22]

Scholarship

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. 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 19th 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.

Busby, Korstanje & Mansfield argue that travel literature serves to recreate the portrait of the unknown. As a mirror, this otherness legitimizes the selfhood. This means that societies weave their own narratives in order to understand the events of political history as well as the place of the other. Travel literature often encourages a new methodology of research with the aim of expanding the comprehension of what urban studies mean. Narrative not only foregrounds the fictions which are at stake in imagining the city as destination, but also provides a vehicle for presenting the much broader social forces that converge in the author at the time of imagining and writing. Using narrative and the story provides an opportunity to address one of the limitations of positivism over the last two hundred years.^[23]

List of travel books

Travel awards

Prizes awarded annually for travel books have included the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, which ran from 1980 to 2004, and the Dolman Best Travel Book Award, which began in 2006.

See also

• Adventure travel
• Beautiful England (series of travel books from 1910 to 1950s)
• Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature
• British Guild of Travel Writers
• Fodor's
• Guidebook
• Imaginary voyages
• Let's Go (book series)
• Outdoor literature
• Picador Travel Classics
• Tourism
• Travel documentary, a documentary film or television program that describes travel

References

Bibliography

• Adams, Percy G., ed. (1988). Travel Literature Through the Ages: An Anthology. New York and London: Garland. ISBN 0-8240-8503-5. 
• Adams, Percy G. (1983). Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel. Lexington: University press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-1492-6. 
• Batten, Charles Lynn (1978). Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-03260-6. OCLC 4419780. 
• Chaney, Edward (1998). The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations Since the Renaissance. London: Frank Cass. ISBN 978-0-7146-4577-3. OCLC 38304358. 
• Chatzipanagioti-Sangmeister, Julia (2006). Griechenland, Zypern, Balkan und Levante: eine kommentierte Bibliographie der Reiseliteratur des 18. Jahrhunderts (in German). Eutin: Lumpeter and Lasel. ISBN 978-3-9810674-2-2. OCLC 470750661. 
• Cox, Edward Godfrey (1935). A Reference Guide To The Literature Of Travel. Including Voyages, Geographical Descriptions, Adventures, Shipwrecks and Expeditions. Seattle: University of Washington.  Vol. 1
• Fussell, Paul (1963). "Patrick Brydone: The Eighteenth-Century Traveler As Representative Man". Literature As a Mode of Travel. New York: New York Public Library. pp. 53–67. OCLC 83683507. 
• Hargett, James M. (1985). "Some Preliminary Remarks on the Travel Records of the Song Dynasty (960-1279)". Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 7 (1/2): 67–93. doi:10.2307/495194. JSTOR 495194. 
• Speake, Jennifer (2003). Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn. ISBN 1-57958-247-8. OCLC 55631133. 
• Stolley, Karen (1992). El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes: un itinerario crítico (in Spanish). Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte. ISBN 978-0-910061-49-0. OCLC 29205545. 

Further reading

• "Essay on travel literature". The Cambridge History of English and American Literature,(1907–1921). 
• Salzani, Carlo, and Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven. "Bibliography for Work in Travel Studies." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (Library) (2010-): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweblibrary/travelstudiesbibliography>.

External links

Look up itinerary in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Travel literature.

Wikivoyage has a travel guide for Travel writing.

• American Journeys, collection of primary exploration accounts of the Americas.
• Historical British travel writers: an extensive open access library on the Vision of Britain site.
• International Society for Travel Writing
• "The Literature of Travel, 1700–1900". Bartleby.com. 
• National Outdoor Book Awards