2.

Forms travel blogs, travel guides, travel journalism

Other forms of writing about a foreign country: mass-media representations

A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but
more selectively. A travel book, at its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the
traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders, and scandals of the
literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply. Travel books are a
sub-species of memoir in which the autobiographical narrative arises from the speakers
encounter with distant or unfamiliar data, and in which the narrative unlike that in a novel or a
romance claims literal validity by constant reference to reality. (Fussel 203)

Travel blogs represent a subtle re-negociation of the boundary between public and
private communication (Thompson 61).

Routledge: p. 192, p. 278

travel writing today probably accommodates a greater range of voices and divergent perspectives than at any
point in its history. The genre also continues to encompass, as it has always done, a great variety of styles, modes
and forms, spanning a full spectrum of low-, middle- and high-brow publications and embracing (sometimes
within a single text) comedy, tragedy and pathos, farce, introspection and reportage although as we shall see, it is
also possible to overstate the generic plurality of modern travel writing. (Thompson in Routledge 197).

Modern travel writing has in this way an engagingly amateur, even democratic aspect, yet the lack of analytical
and methodological rigour strongly associated with the form largely disqualifies it from serious consideration by
academic professionals in most disciplines. As a result, travel writing is now a genre firmly categorized as
recreational reading. (Thompson 199)

Since their appearance in the late 1990s, travel blogs have become not only a source of travel
information for tourists, but also a form of communicating cross-cultural encounters and thus assigning
various images to different parts of the world.

The most important characteristics of the travel blog, as outlined by Kylie Cardell and Kate Douglas, are:
a focus on the personal experience of travel, the inclusion of a variety of media forms (video,
photography), the importance of serialization, as the travel blog is also a narrative formed through
accretion (299), and its constant fluctuation between blogging platforms and social media. Considered
as a sub-genre of travel writing, the travel blog derives its appeal from its authenticity as a first-person,
eyewitness account (299), as well as for the sense of immediacy that it offers: bloggers often write on

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the road and post updates of their location. This practice also enables an enhanced interaction between
the travelers and their audience.

The travel blog resonates with the earliest forms of travel writing where documentation and evidence are the
paramount concern. Moreover, in historical travel diaries and journals, the writer is implicitly conscious of an
audience back home to whom their narrative is also partly (if not completely) addressed. (305)