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Travel writing is currently a flourishing and highly popular literary genre. Every year a stream of new travelogues flows from the printing press, whilst travel writers like Michael Palin, Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux regularly feature in the bestseller lists in both Europe and America. The reading public’s appetite for the form has also prompted publishers to reissue many old out-of-print travel books in series such as Random House’s Vintage Departures and Picador’s Travel Classics. As a result, armchair travellers today can indulge their taste for the exotic, or for adventure, or simply for news of the wider world, by drawing on a vast array of both contemporary and historical travel books. These books recount journeys made for almost every conceivable purpose, to well-nigh every destination in the world. Their authors range from pilgrims, conquistadors and explorers to backpackers, minor celebrities and comedians undertaking a madcap jaunt on some inappropriate mode of transport; and they range also from ‘serious’ writers, seeking to make a significant contribution to art or knowledge, to hack writers and dilettantes happy to churn out the most superficial whimsy. Yet if the term ‘travel writing’ encompasses a bewildering diversity of forms, modes and itineraries, what is not in question is the popularity of the genre as a whole: recent decades have undoubtedly witnessed a travel writing ‘boom’, and this boom shows no signs of abating in the near future.
As well as enjoying commercial success, travel writing has seen its literary status rise in recent decades. For much of the twentieth century at least, the genre was usually dismissed by literary critics and cultural commentators as a minor, somewhat middle-brow form. However, travel writing’s reputation rose sharply in the latter part of the century, with the appearance of a new generation of critically acclaimed travel writers such as Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin, Ryszard Kapuscinski and Robyn Davidson. Also leading the way in this regard was the prestigious British literary journal Granta, which ran several travel-themed special issues in the 1980s and 1990s, and thereby played ‘a vital part in establishing … travel writing as the popular literary form it has become’ (Jack 1998: viii). Implicit in Granta’s championing of the form was the assumption that travel writing is a genre especially reflective of, and responsive to, the modern condition. We live, after all, in an era of increasing globalisation, in which mobility, travel and cross-cultural contact are facts of life, and an everyday reality, for many people. Tourism, for example, is now one of the largest industries in the world. At any given moment, moreover, a significant portion of the global population is on the move not through choice, or for recreation, but through necessity, as they are displaced through economic hardship, environmental disaster or war. In these circumstances, travel writing has acquired a new relevance and prestige, as a genre that can provide important insights into the often fraught encounters and exchanges currently taking place between cultures, and into the lives being led, and the subjectivities being formed, in a globalising world.
Over the same period, academic interest in travel writing has also increased dramatically. Scholars and students working in several different disciplines have found the genre relevant to a broad range of cultural, political and historical debates. This is a development especially associated with the spread of what has come to be termed ‘postcolonialism’, or ‘postcolonial studies’, in many branches of the humanities and social sciences. Broadly speaking, the aim of postcolonial studies is to comprehend, and to contest, the pernicious consequences of the vast European empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The European imperial project, and the global capitalism it promoted, laid the foundations of our modern, globalised world. It brought about cross-cultural contact, and the relocation of individuals and peoples, on a massive scale. It also did much to establish the enormous inequalities that currently exist between the different regions of the world, and especially between the developed ‘West’ and less developed ‘Rest’, in terms of wealth, health and technological advancement. Postcolonialist scholars have accordingly sought to understand the processes that first created, and now perpetuate, these inequalities, and they have also concerned themselves more generally with questions relating to how cultures regard and depict each other, and how they interact. These are research agendas for which travel writing is an immensely useful resource. From the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, the genre played an integral role in European imperial expansion, and the travel writing of this period is accordingly highly revealing of the activities of European travellers abroad, and of the attitudes and ideologies that drove European expansionism. Similarly, modern travel writing can yield significant insights into the ideologies and practices that sustain the current world order.
It is not just the rise of postcolonial studies, however, that has brought about the recent burgeoning of academic interest in travel writing. In the aftermath of 1970s ‘second-wave’ feminism, many historians and literary critics have investigated women’s contribution to a genre that superficially seems strongly associated with men, although women have in fact been prolific producers of travelogues, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The genre has also featured in literary studies in debates about canonicity, and the relationship between aesthetic and functional forms of writing: the ‘literary’ and the ‘non-literary’. In social sciences such as Geography, Anthropology and Sociology, meanwhile, the recent interest in travel writing is partly a consequence of theoretical and methodological debates as to the forms of knowledge and enquiry most appropriate to each discipline. All three disciplines to some extent evolved out of travel writing, engaging in enquiries that once were principally associated with, and articulated in, the genre known in English as ‘voyages and travels’. Institutionalised in the academy in the nineteenth century, however, they sought to distinguish themselves from more anecdotal and subjective forms of travel writing by espousing scientific methodologies and modes of discourse. But with the so-called ‘cultural’ or ‘literary turn’ of the 1970s, the supposedly scientific objectivity of the geographic or ethnographic text was called into question (see Rapport and Overing 2002: 236–45); and this has in turn prompted an ongoing reassessment of the role of travel writing as a vehicle for geographic, ethnographic and sociological knowledge.
These are just some of the larger debates and research contexts that have drawn scholars to the travel writing genre. Yet if travel writing is now seemingly as popular with academic readers as it is with general readers, it should be noted that these two audiences are not entirely in step with each other, or in accord in their attitudes to the genre. The commercial success currently enjoyed by the genre would seem to suggest a straightforward enjoyment of travel writing amongst the reading public. Yet much of the scholarly discussion of travel writing has been undertaken in a pronounced spirit of critique, and indeed censure, rather than celebration. Witness the judgement passed by Debbie Lisle, a specialist in International Relations, in her study of contemporary British and American travel writing. Lisle laments that there is ‘something wrong with travel writing in general’ (2006: xi, emphasis in the original), and is moved to ask, ‘Why … are travelogues still being written in our supposedly “enlightened” age? And why are they still so popular?’ (2). She condemns the genre on the grounds that it encourages ‘a particularly conservative political outlook that extends to its vision of global politics’ (xi), and other commentators have concurred in this assessment of the form’s intrinsic bias. Thus Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, in what is perhaps the best recent survey of contemporary travel writing, suggest that the genre is often ‘a refuge for complacent, even nostalgically retrograde, middle-class values’ (1998: viii). Robyn Davidson, meanwhile, believes that the recent surge of popular interest in the genre is underpinned by nostalgia for a period
when home and abroad, occident and orient, centre and periphery were unproblematically defined. Perhaps [travel books] are popular for the very reason they are so deceptive. They create the illusion that there is still an uncontaminated Elsewhere to discover.
(2002: 6)
These commentators would contest the Granta view that contemporary travel writing offers us powerful insights into the modern, globalised world. Instead, they regard the form as typically seeking not to reflect or explore contemporary realities, but rather to escape them. In an age when many cultures and societies are less homogeneous than they once were, and when many people possess what is sometimes termed a ‘hyphenated’ identity (British Asian, for example, or African American), distinctions between ‘them’ and ‘us’, ‘home’ and ‘abroad’, seem less sharp than they used to. Travel writing responds to this situation, it is alleged, by reinstating a firm sense of the differences that pertain between cultures, regions and ethnicities, and by dealing in stereotypes that are frequently pernicious. And by doing so, it is suggested, the genre usually delivers a consoling, self-congratulatory message to the privileged, middle-class Westerners who are its principal readership.
As this will suggest, the recent wave of academic interest in travel writing should not necessarily be regarded as a straightforward endorsement or celebration of the form. Whilst travel writing undoubtedly constitutes a useful resource in a range of ongoing scholarly debates, many researchers seek to read individual travelogues ‘against the grain’, so to speak, so as to decipher and critique their larger ideological implications and geopolitical consequences. This is the case not only with contemporary but also with historical travel writing, where scholars have generally been most concerned to trace the genre’s complicity in the crimes and injustices inflicted by European imperialism; its contribution to the racist beliefs and ideologies that were so common in the high imperial period, for example, and its role in promoting racial and cultural supremacism. When one combines these critiques of both past and present travel writing, accordingly, it would seem that the current academic verdict on the genre is fairly damning. Travel writing, one might easily surmise from much of the recent scholarly literature on the topic, is a somewhat distasteful and morally dubious literary form; and even if it is not intrinsically so, then this is seemingly an appropriate verdict on how most writers have historically used the genre.
However, travel writing also has academic defenders. Mark Cocker, for example, declares that ‘travel is one of the greatest doors to human freedom, and the travel book is a medium through which humans celebrate this freedom’ (1992: 260). This is perhaps a little vague and grandiloquent; it certainly begs many questions as to who historically has been able to exercise this freedom, and the extent to which such freedom may come at the expense of others. Discussing the travel writers associated with Granta, meanwhile, Jim Philip suggests that the best recent travel writing works to foster an internationalist vision, and implicitly, a cosmopolitan attitude that encourages tolerance, understanding and a sense of global community. Or as Philip puts it, ‘it may be possible … to read these texts as a site of the emergence, however tentatively, of a new kind of international society … capable both of figuring and of opposing those forces of capital which have preceded it upon the global scene’ (White 1993: 251, emphasis in the original). Holland and Huggan, for their part, soften their often trenchant critique of contemporary travel writing with an acknowledgement of the form’s ‘defamiliarizing capacities’ (1998: viii). They suggest that travelogues may serve as ‘a useful vehicle of cultural self-perception’, thereby showing ‘readers the limits of their ambition and remind[ing] them of their responsibilities’ (xiii). With regard to the travel writing of earlier eras, similarly, some scholars have pointed out that travelogues may vary greatly in the extent of their complicity with European imperialism, and that their consequences were not always wholly baleful and exploitative. As Dennis Porter has written, whilst European travel writing at its worst has often been ‘a vehicle for the expression of Eurocentric conceit or racist intolerance’, at its best the genre has also constituted a worthy attempt ‘to overcome cultural distance through a protracted act of understanding’ (1991: 3).
As this will suggest, the recent burgeoning of academic interest in travel writing has been accompanied by considerable controversy and debate about the merits and morality of the genre. The purpose of the present volume, it should stressed, is not to adjudicate in these arguments over the ethical implications of travel writing. Rather, it aims to equip readers to form their own opinion on several key debates currently associated with the genre. To this end, the volume is organised around some of the principal issues or themes in the recent scholarly literature on travel writing. Chapter 2 discusses the basic but complex issue of how we define travel writing, and considers the many different forms that the genre can take. Chapter 3 then offers a brisk overview of the evolution of travel writing, or at least of Western travel writing, from the ancient period to the present day, whilst Chapter 4 addresses the problems of authority and reliability connected with travel writing, exploring the diverse strategies by which writers have historically attempted to convey, and readers to assess, the truthfulness of travel accounts. Chapter 5 considers the autobiographical aspects of travel writing, and examines the diverse ways in which travelogues can become an exploration not so much of the wider world, as of the traveller’s own selfhood and subjectivity. Perhaps the most fraught debate currently attendant on travel writing is then discussed in Chapter 6, that of the ethical and political implications of travel writing’s fundamental agenda of offering images and representations of other peoples and other cultures. And finally, Chapter 7 considers how issues of gender and sexuality impinge on travel and travel writing; it addresses firstly the extent to which travel writing has often constituted a highly masculinised medium of self-expression and self-fashioning, before going on to discuss the many women who have nevertheless utilised the genre to their own ends, and the constraints that they have had to negotiate in so doing.
The volume focuses principally on travel writing produced in what one can loosely call ‘the West’: that is to say, Europe and North America, and the cultural tradition stretching back to the Ancient Greeks to which modern Europeans and Americans, rightly or wrongly, lay claim. Further to this, the focus also falls mainly on travel accounts written in English by British and American travellers, and on the British and American contexts for those accounts. Travel writing has of course been produced by non-Western cultures (see, inter alia, Plutschow 2006; Euben 2008), and within the Western tradition there have been many travelogues produced by travellers of French, German, Italian and other national origins (see Polezzi 2001; Forsdick 2005; Martin 2008). As Loredana Polezzi has noted, this non-Anglophone travel literature has received comparatively little attention in British and American studies of travel writing, which have tended ‘to marginalize texts written in languages other than English, for readerships other than English-speaking ones’ (2001: 1). The present volume perpetuates this tendency, although it does at least seek to alert readers to important examples of travel writing produced in non-English speaking cultures. Yet the themes and issues broached in the chapters that follow are undoubtedly relevant to every form of travel text, in every culture and every period. In addressing these topics, therefore, the volume will equip readers with a conceptual framework, and a critical vocabulary, that should prove useful whatever form or tradition of travel writing they are interested in, and whatever disciplinary perspective they adopt on the genre.