Travel literature

Travel literature

Itinerary" redirects here. For the ancient form of route listing, see itinerarium.

"Travel book" redirects here. For a listing of places to see at a destination, see Guide book.

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

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 1786 Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.

Contents  
1 History
2 Travel books
2.1 Adventure literature
2.2 Guide books
2.3 Travel journals
2.4 Fiction
3 Scholarship
4 List of travel books
5 Travel awards
6 See also
7 Notes
8 References
9 External links


History

Early examples of travel literature include Pausanias' Description of Greece in the 2nd century CE,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.

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

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

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. In 18th century Britain, almost every famous writer worked in the travel literature form.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. 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.

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 includes guide books, meant to educate the reader about the destination, provide advice for visits, and inspire readers to travel. Travel writing may be found on web sites, in magazines and in books. It has been produced by travelers including military officers, missionaries, explorers, scientists, pilgrims, and migrants. The Americans, Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson and William Least Heat-Moon, Welsh author Jan Morris and Englishman Eric Newby are or were widely acclaimed as travel writers although Morris is also a historian and Theroux a novelist.

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

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, Deborah Tall's The Island of the White Cow and Peter Mayle's best-selling A Year in Provence and its sequels.

Travel and nature writing merge 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 trave

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

Main article: Guide book

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". An early example is Thomas West's, guide to the Lake District published in 1778.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.

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. Published in 1778 the book was a major success.

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.

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. An example of a fictional work of travel literature based on an actual journey, is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which has its origin in an actual voyage made by Conrad up the River Congo. A 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.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.

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.[citation needed]

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.

List of travel books

Further information: List of travel books

Travel awards

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

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
• Guidebook
• Imaginary voyages
• Outdoor literature
• Picador Travel Classics
• Tourism
• Travel documentary, a documentary film or television program that describes travel

Notes

1.  J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 937.
2.  El-Shihibi, Fathi A. (2006). Travel Genre in Arabic Literature: A Selective Literary and Historical Study (Originally presented as the author's thesis (Ph.D.--Boston University, 1998)). Boca Raton, Fla: Dissertation.com. ISBN 1-58112-326-4.
3.  Hargett 1985, p. 67.
4.  Hargett 1985, pp. 67–93.
5.  Hargett 1985, pp. 74–76.
6.  Deschaux, Robert; Taillevent, Michault (1975). Un poète bourguignon du XVe siècle, Michault Taillevent: édition et étude. Librairie Droz. pp. 31–32.
7.  Stolley 1992, p. 26.
8.  Fussell 1963, p. 54.
9.  Travel with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879); Re the first sleeping bag in 1876 [1]
10.  F. Regard, British Narratives of Exploration: Case Studies of the Self and Other, London, Pickering and Chatto, 2009.
11.  Joshua Slocum Society: [2].
12.  Slocum (1899), Sailing Alone Around the World
13.  New Oxford American Dictionary
14.  Thomas West, (1821) [1778]. A Guide to the Lakes in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire. Kendal: W. Pennington.
15.  West. A Guide to the Lakes. p. 2.
16.  "Development of tourism in the Lake District National Park". Lake District UK. Retrieved 2008-11-27.
17.  "Understanding the National Park — Viewing Stations". Lake District National Park Authority. Retrieved 2008-11-27.
18.  New Oxford American Dictionary.
19.  See Joseph Conrad's The Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces, edited by Zdzisław Najder, 1978,
20.  FinkelFinkel, Michael (August 2008). "Kira Salek: The White Mary". National Geographic Adventure. Retrieved 12 November 2010.
21.  Trachtenberg, Jeffrey A. (26 July 2008). "Imaginary Journey". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 12 November 2010.
22.  "The White Mary: A Novel". Amazon.com. ISBN 0805088474.
23. Busby, G., M.E. Korstanje, and C. Mansfield. 2011. “Madrid: Literary Fiction and the Imaginary Urban Destination.” Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice Volume 3 (2): 1-18.

References

• 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.

External links

• 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" and "Essay on travel literature, from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907–1921).
• National Outdoor Book Awards
• Travel Blog Directory Regularly updated listing of travel blogs.