Journeys through

Space and Time:

A Brief History
of Travel Writing
PROFESSOR MARY GOODWIN
NATIONAL TAIWAN NORMAL UNIVERSITY ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
NOVEMBER 2022
What is Travel Writing?
 Travel writing is a genre of creative non-fiction. It typically
records the experiences of a traveler in some interesting places
and circumstances. It might include vivid descriptions,
illustrations, historical background, and possibly maps and
diagrams. The modern travel vlogger will even offer video on
social media!
What Shapes Travel Writing?
 Traveler’s background/education/social status
 Traveler’s goal or motivation for traveling: curiosity, trade and
financial gain, power, exile or refugee
 Traveler’s goal in writing: entertainment; curiosity; power and
conquest; glory and fame; financial gain; education
 How travel writer collects information (anecdote or observation):
eg, Herodotus as the Father of History and the Father of Lies;
writer’s research skills; anecdotes presented
How to Read Travel Writing
 How information is presented (as fact or hearsay or narrative): tone, style, physical
or social elements of scene, with or without judgment, etc.
 How “the Other” is presented: The same as the writer’s readers – “ourselves”? Or
strange, odd? Inferior?
 How readers/audience of writer might have responded to this new information
 How true is it? The issue of truth has been one of the most constant, complex, and
contentious in the cultural history of travel writing. Whether the travel was
undertaken in the name of exploration, pilgrimage, science, inspiration, self-
discovery, or a combination of these elements, questions of veracity and authenticity
inevitably arise.
 Travel writing now comes up against the Internet: the Travel Channel, National
Geography, the Discovery Channel, guidebooks, etc.
“Travel writing: Truth or Fiction?”
“As early as the start of the 17th century, then, people were becoming skeptical about
travel writers. And with good reason. Academics now doubt that Cartwright, for example,
was even a preacher.
“Introducing ‘color’ altering the sequence of events to make a book or article "flow,"
exaggeration, invention and downright lying all have a history in the chronicling of travel
that goes back at least as far as the ancient mariners who told stories of sirens and sea
monsters.
"The lie is intrinsic to travel books", the prize-winning author Stefano Malatesta told La
Stampa, this week. "And as ignorance of the world gradually diminishes, the difficulty of
recounting it in books increases."
Malatesta argued that lies and exaggerations had an essential role to play in stimulating
people's imaginations - and their desire to travel.”
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/blog/2009/sep/24/travel-writing-truth-or-lies
Questions of Travel
The poet Elizabeth Bishop reflects on French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s
observation that “All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet
room alone,” wondering if indeed travel is a destructive undertaking. In Self-
Reliance, R W Emerson likewise claims that traveling is a fool’s paradise, the
desperate activity of an empty mind. What then is the fundamental value of travel? In
what way might travel be construed as destructive or meaningless activity?
Pico Iyer, “Why We Travel”
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We
travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our
newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance
and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed.
And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again -- to slow time down and get
taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best
described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana
in his lapidary essay, "The Philosophy of Travel." We "need sometimes," the Harvard
philosopher wrote, "to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral
holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste
hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what."
Early Voyages of Discovery
Herodotus, Greek historian and geographer (425
BCE), Histories
Strabo, Greek geographer (64 BCE), Geographica
Pausanius ,Greek traveler and geographer (2CE);
Description of Greece based on his own observations
Marco Polo (1271 and 1295), Travels tells of
experiences at the court of Kublai Khan.
Sir John Mandeville (1357-71), popular travel
memoir of trip through Turkey to India
Christopher Columbus, Italian explorer (1451)
Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Spanish conquistador
(1584), History of the New World
Early Explorers
The Grand Tour and
18th century travelers
Notable writers of this
period, all British, include
Lady Montagu, Jonathan
Swift, Alexander Pope,
James Boswell Laurence
Sterne, Tobias Smollett,
Samuel Johnson. A number
of these were poets and
novelists as well.
Heyday in the
19th century
Among many other
traveling writers of the
period were Lord Byron,
Frances Trollope,
Charles Dickens, Charles
Darwin, William
Wordsworth, H D
Thoreau, Mark Twain
and Henry James
Heyday of Travel in the 19th Century
Travel Writing and Gender
 A great number of travel writers in
modern times have been women:
Edith Wharton, Isak Dinesen, Mary
Kingsley, Isabella Bird, Isabelle
Eberhardt, Beryl Markham, Emily
Hahn, Pearl Buck, Anna Leonowens,
Alexandra David-Neel, Leila Philip,
MFK Fisher, Frances Mayes, Grizzuti
Harrison, Mary McCarthy and
recently, Eat Pray Love author
Elizabeth Gilbert.
Travel Writing and Gender
Gender and Travel
In Mary Morris’s introduction to Maiden Voyages,
she remarks, “Women travel differently from
men.” How might female travelers move in the
world? What different accommodations/observations
do women travelers make?
Exiles and Expatriates
The early 20th century saw a great
exodus of American writers, artists
and intellectuals to Europe
following the first world war,
including Gertrude Stein, Ezra
Pound, T S Eliot, the Irish writer
James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, F
Scott Fitzgerald, James Baldwin,
Katherine Anne Porter, Henry
Miller, Lawrence Durrell among
others.
Personal Research Interest

 Homes Away from Home:

The Intimate Geographies of Pearl Buck,
Gertrude Stein and Elizabeth Bishop.

 (PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 2007)

Professional Travelers

The later years of the

20th century gave us
some remarkable
work from
professional travelers
Jan Morris, V. S.
Naipaul, Paul
Theroux, Bruce
Chatwin, and
anthropologist
Margaret Mead.
Travel Writing Theory and Scholarship
 Wiki: Travel literature emerged as a field of scholarly inquiry in the mid-1990s,
with journals, anthologies, and encyclopedias published, courses offered in
Travel Literature specifically, and many conferences organized. 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 presentations 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.
Social Media Travelers
 Best Travel Vloggers on
YouTube in 2022
 Gone with the Wynns.
 Vagabrothers.
 Sam & Audrey TV.
 Fun for Louis.
 The Budgeteers.
 Mark Wiens.
 Hey Nadine.
More Variants of Travel Literature
 Adventure Travel
 Extreme Travel
 Travel in Fiction (The Odyssey, the Iliad, The
Canterbury Tales, Dante’s Divine Comedy,
Gulliver’s Travels, Around the World in 80 Days
by Jules Verne, space fiction/fantasy travel of the
20th century)
 Time Travel
Travel Writers and the Other
What do travel writers seem to expect of the local people, and what
impressions and images do they register of meeting them?
How does the travel writer interact with the local people?
What are the physical, cultural, social, even “psychological” details
noted by the writer?
What tone does each writer use in developing an image of the “Other”
he or she encounters?
Resources
 Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travelers, ed. Mary Morris (available at
Bookman Books, Hsinsheng S. Road, over the McDonald’s)
 The Norton Book of Travel, ed. Paul Fussell (Norton: 1987)
https://archive.org/details/nortonbookoftrav00fuss
 An Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing, eds. Shirley Foster and Sara Mills;
 Sara Mills, Discourses of Differences: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and
Colonialism
 Eric Newby (ed.), A Book of Travelers’ Tales
 Percy Adams (ed.), Travel Literature Through the Ages: An Anthology;
 Michael Kowalewski (ed.), Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern
Literature of Travel
Last words from Pico Iyer
 “So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our
minds mobile and awake. As Santayana, the heir to
Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote, ‘There is
wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar
to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills
prejudice, and it fosters humor.’ "