TRAVEL WRITING:

“The literature of travel is gigantic; it has a thousand

forms and faces.”
( Adams, P., 1983, p. 281)
Compiled by Antoinette Gregory October 2022
Presentation Overview

 Defining Travel Writing/Travel Literature

 Categories and Features
 Brief overview: Historical Travel Writing
 British Travel Writing
 American Travel Writing
 Moby Dick: Features of Travel Writing
 Bibliography

Compiled by Antoinette Gregory October 2022

Defining Travel Writing/Travel Literature

Broad Definition:

encounter and observation of a traveller’s records/report of individual

impression of his travel transmitting the cultural values. What is seen is
detailed for others to experience.

As Andrea Loselle remarks in Haunted Journeys: Desire and

Transgression in European Travel Writing (1992).

“Of all the genres, travel writing is the most chameleon-like because it
can assume almost any number of styles from poetry to autobiography
to a report destined for political and economic use”.

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Theorist Definitions on Travel writing
Peter Carl
Hulme(2005) Thompson(2011)
“Travel writing is It “has always
certainly embraced a
literature ,but it is bewildering diverse
never fiction” range of material and
“Travel writing must has always
relate a journey that maintained a complex
must have been made and confusing
by the relationship with a
author/narrator” number of closely
related(indeed often
overlapping) genres”
Compiled by Antoinette Gregory October 2022
Tim Jonathan Raban
Youngs(2005) (2017)
“Travel writing consists “As a literary form, travel
writing is a notoriously
of predominantly
raffish open house
factual, first-person where different genres
prose accounts of are likely to end up in
travels that have been the same bed. It
undertaken by the accommodates the
author-narrator. It private diary, the essay,
includes discussion of the short story, the
works that some may prose poem, the rough
regard as genres in note and polished table
their own right.” talk with indiscriminate
hospitality”
Categories of Travel Writing

 Scientific reports
 Diary
 Autobiography
 Correspondence/letters/documents
 Novels
 Journalism
 A middle-ground definition: the genre encompasses both private and publication-
oriented narrative texts that may show different degrees of fictionalization and
which are based on actual journeys undertaken by their authors for a variety of
possible purposes.

Compiled by Antoinette Gregory October 2022

4 Fundamental Features: Whatever the period it was written in

 The Quest
 The inner journey
 Race
 Gender and sexuality

According to The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing:

“…a dynamic genre, often employed for radical aims. It is associated with colonialism
and capitalist expansion and with patriarchy, but it can also be oppositional,
interrogative and subversive”

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Brief Overview: Some Historical Travel Texts

 Pausanias (AD 110 – c. 180) Description of Greece.

 Journey Through Wales (1191) and Description of Wales (1194), written in Latin by
Gerald of Wales
 The Travels of Marco Polo dated about 1350
 Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift
 Diaries from explorers such as Captain James Cook (1784) what we call today a best-
seller
 The Voyage of the Beagle. Darwin's biogeographic observations

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British Travel Writing

 any type of query related to foreign concerns

 foreign information to fuel interest and knowledge of different cultures, religions and
geographical areas

 The need to map and catalogue territories, fauna as well as flora in order to fill in blank spaces

 The exploration of Africa spurred the most classic forms of Victorian travel writing, for example,
Joseph Conrad’s prolific novel Heart of Darkness published in 1899

 Records of colonial explorations and conquests sought to affirm and legitimize the values,
discourses, and agendas home societies

Compiled by Antoinette Gregory October 2022

American Travel Writing

 mapping America for transatlantic readers interested in settling the frontier

 involved the religious itinerant traveling simultaneously across spiritual and actual landscapes

 promotional writing meant to attract emigrants and funding for British colonies e.g. William
Penn’s Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania in America (1681), which aimed to sell
English migrants and capitalists on the future of his new colony.

 Landscape and national identity Landscape description has also been important in the
establishment of national identities

 to claim superiority to European scenery, and later by describing the relations between people
and the land in distinctly American contexts.

 As a framework for harmonizing multiple interests, each in and of itself central to nation-building
and management: commercial, spiritual, socio-political, scientific, and, of course, literary.

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Moby Dick: Travel Writing Components
Literary Travel Writing Components
 First-Person Narrative Voice
 Scientific reports
 Non-fiction material; maps, illustrations, layout of a whale ship
 Essays/plays

Travel Writing Components in terms of the story

 The Quest
 The inner journey
 Race
 Gender and sexuality
Compiled by Antoinette Gregory October 2022
Bibliography

 Adams, P., 1978. Travel Literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Review of Recent
Approaches. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 20 (3), pp.488-515.

 Bendixen, A. and Hamera, J. eds., 2009. The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing.
Cambridge University Press.

 Hulme, P, Youngs, T. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2005.

 Loselle, A. "Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing." (1992): 144-
148.

 Parr, A., ed., Three Renaissance Travel Plays: The Travels of the Three English Brothers, The Sea
Voyages, The Antipodes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995

 Raban, J. as cited in Borm, J., 2017. Defining travel: On the travel book, travel writing and
terminology. In Perspectives on travel writing (pp. 13-26). Routledge.

 Thompson, C., 2011. Travel writing. Routledge.

Compiled by Antoinette Gregory October 2022