Travel Writing

An Overview

Around 1130 BCE, an Egyptian priest named Wenamon made a voyage from Thebes to Lebanon, to purchase for his temple a consignment of cedar wood. The trip was a disaster: Wenamon was robbed, chased by pirates and at one point almost killed, when he himself was mistaken for a pirate. Yet it did have one important outcome. Wenamon subsequently wrote a report on his misadventures, and that report has survived, albeit in a fragmentary condition; it constitutes, according to the historian Lionel Casson, ‘the earliest detailed account of a voyage in existence’ ( 1974: 39).

As this will suggest, travel writing has a long history, stretching back into antiquity. Indeed, if we expand our definition of the genre to include tales of travel passed on by word of mouth, it doubtless extends into prehistory. Human beings have probably always told stories about journeys made by themselves or their ancestors. In some cases, as in the still-surviving ‘Songlines’ of the Australian Aboriginal peoples, these stories may have combined practical usefulness with religious or spiritual observance, detailing routes through a landscape whilst simultaneously registering and reverencing the mythic significance of every landmark along that route. More generally, we can assume that they served variously to entertain, to pass on important knowledge, and to maintain the collective memory of tribal groups. But whatever their function, vestiges of older oral traditions are certainly apparent in some of the earliest written treatments of the travel theme, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh (c.1000 BCE), Homer’s Odyssey (c.600 BCE), and the Biblical books of Genesis and Exodus (which reached their final written forms in the fifth century BCE).

Although a fictive account of a largely legendary traveller, it is The Odyssey that inaugurates the Western tradition specifically of travel writing. That is to say, it is both one of the earliest written accounts of travel, and also the first text that exerted a significant influence on subsequent travel literature, both fictional and non-fictional. The poem’s episodic structure, its thematic focus on misadventure and problematic homecoming, and its presentation of its traveller-protagonist as a crafty, sometimes morally questionable individual, all provided templates that were taken up by many later writers, in connection with accounts of both real and imagined journeys. In what follows, accordingly, my principal concern is to trace from The Odyssey onwards the evolution first of European, and then subsequently, after the European settlement of America, of what I shall term Western travel writing.

The Ancient World

People travelled in ancient times for diverse reasons: to make war, or to escape it; to conduct trade by land or sea; to visit religious shrines and oracles; and to administer and maintain the various empires of the Ancient world, from the Egyptian through to the Roman. And from as early as 1500 BCE, it seems, some were travelling simply for recreational reasons, making visits to the Sphinx, the Great Pyramid and similar destinations principally in a spirit of sight-seeing (see Casson 1974: 32).

All this activity gave rise to a number of forms of travel-related text. Amongst the most basic and functional were the documents known as periploi in Greek, or navigationes in Latin (in the singular, periplus and navigatio). These provided navigational directions for sea captains. Usually they consisted of little more than a bare list of ports and coastal landmarks, together with an estimate of the distance between them; occasionally they might interweave a more detailed description of the voyage that had first reconnoitred this route. Equivalent documents existed for overland journeys, and were known in Latin as itineraria (singular, itinerarium).

More elaborate forms of travel writing are chiefly to be found, in the Classical era, in works that blur modern generic categories. Herodotus has been called the ‘Father of History’, but he can also be regarded as a travel writer, since his account of the Greco-Persian wars in The Histories (c.431–425 BCE) draws significantly on his own travels around the Mediterranean and Black Sea, and includes lengthy ethnographic digressions on the cultures he encountered. Strabo’s Geography (c.7–24 CE) similarly includes information drawn from the writer’s own journeys, along with many reports from other travellers. Pausanias’s Description of Greece (c.155–80 CE), meanwhile, seems close in spirit to a modern guidebook, offering detailed accounts of Greek antiquities and rituals.

None of these works, however, offer the reader any sort of re-creation in writing of the original travel experience. Typically, they just provide the information garnered during the author’s personal travels. This is the norm in most travel-related writings of the Ancient era, which seldom conform to our modern notion of the ‘travel book’ as a first-person narrative of travel. One exception, however, is Horace’s poem ‘A Journey to Brundisium’, in Book 1 of his Satires (c.35 BCE). This lively travelogue in verse offers a much more personal travel account, in which the narrator recounts some of the hardships and misfortunes which befell him along the way, and in this regard it provided an important model for travel writers in later eras.

One of the earliest accounts of Christian pilgrimage, the Pilgrimage of Egeria (c.381–84 CE), also places more emphasis on the travelling self, and on the details of the journey, than was usual in this period. Egeria, sometimes known as Aetheria, was a woman, possibly a nun, who travelled from Spain or Western Gaul to Jerusalem. An account of her journey, in the form of a long letter to her compatriots, subsequently circulated in manuscript, and is thus the earliest first-person, non-fictional narrative of travel we know of in the Western tradition. As the following passage shows, it provides a fairly detailed account of Egeria’s itinerary in the Holy Land:

We reached the place on the Jordan where holy Joshua the son of Nun sent the children of Israel across, and they passed over, as we are told in the book of Joshua the son of Nun. We were also shown a slightly raised place on the Jericho side of the river, where the children of Reuben and Gad and the half tribe of Manasseh made an altar. After crossing the river we came to the city of Livias, in the plain where the children of Israel encamped in those days.

(Wilkinson 1999: 113)

As this will suggest, the focus of Egeria’s narrative falls principally on the spiritual significance of the landscapes through which she moves, and on the devotional practices of the people she encounters, rather than on her personal thoughts and feelings. As a result, it still seems to modern eyes a rather impersonal form of travel writing, even though it is cast in the first person.

There are also many fictive treatments of travel in Classical literature. The Odyssey has been mentioned already, but the Greek romances of late antiquity, by Heliodorus and others, also often set their protagonists wandering through the Mediterranean world and beyond, to encounter shipwreck, kidnap by pirates and similar misfortunes. And Lucian’s True History (written between 160 and 185 CE) is arguably the first parody of travel writing; in a satire on the preposterous and fantastical claims made by many travellers in this era, it recounts a voyage to the moon.

Medieval Travellers and Travel Writing

The medieval era, like the Classical era, produced an abundance of travel-related texts. Once again, however, few of these texts conform closely to our modern notion of the travel book. Rather, the reports of travellers are often woven into medieval geographies, natural histories, bestiaries and ‘books of wonders’. The continents of Asia and Africa especially were a source of fascination to readers in Europe, and gave rise to a rich, if often highly speculative, literature. Very few of these accounts, however, are first-person narratives of travel in which the writer recounts his or her own experience. Typically, they are compendia of information, in which the observations of Classical authorities such as Herodotus and Pliny are combined with more recent reports that have filtered back, often via a series of intermediaries, to the centres of intellectual activity in Europe. As a consequence, many medieval travel texts seem to modern readers a curious blend of the factual and the fabulous, as they combine plausible descriptions of foreign peoples and places with accounts of monstrous or miraculous beings that are clearly projections of European fears and fantasies, such as winged centaurs, dog-headed men and Amazons.

First-person accounts of actual travels occur most commonly in this era in the form of the ‘peregrinatio’, or pilgrimage narrative. Feudal society did not encourage much personal mobility, but pilgrimage was one form of culturally sanctioned travel, and by the later Middle Ages something akin to a tourist industry had emerged, catering for pilgrims visiting Rome and the Holy Land, and to many local sites of religious significance. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c.1387) provide a vivid depiction in verse of the medieval pilgrimage. For real-life pilgrims, numerous handbooks were available, offering practical and devotional advice to would-be travellers, and some of these guides were written by authors who had themselves made the pilgrimage. As with the fourth-century Pilgrimage of Egeria, however, the element of travelogue is often strictly subordinated to the text’s practical and religious concerns. Typically, there is little effort to record the events of the actual journey, or the traveller’s subjective thoughts and feelings. Nor do these accounts usually evince much interest in the natural world, or in the other cultures encountered during the journey. In such a strongly Christian era, an excessive interest in such secular matters might potentially be classified as the sin of curiositas (curiosity). It was the education of the soul that was the text’s first concern, a homiletic agenda that often makes the medieval pilgrimage narrative little more than a compilation of passages from the Bible.

Not every traveller in the medieval era was a pilgrim, of course. Within Europe, men might also travel on church business, or as merchants, diplomats, soldiers and scholars; women, meanwhile, would sometimes accompany husbands and fathers in their travels, and on occasion undertook journeys on their own. The Crusades took many Christian Europeans to the Near and Middle East, and many more gained some familiarity with the region through subsequent chronicles of events there. Missionaries and embassies were also periodically sent still further afield, to places such as China, India and Africa. It was a diplomatic mission to the court of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan that produced the most famous travel account of this period, the Travels of Marco Polo, which circulated in various versions, and under various titles, from the late thirteenth century onwards. Polo’s description of the wealth and sophistication of China, as set down in writing by the romance-writer Rustichello da Pisa, fascinated the age, although it also provoked much scepticism and incredulity in contemporary readers.

After Marco Polo’s Travels, the most influential and widely circulated travel narrative of the late middle ages was the Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c.1356). This account, originally written in Anglo-French, begins as a guide for pilgrims to the Holy Land, supposedly based on the author’s own travels in that region, but then extends beyond the Middle East to discuss China, India and well-nigh the whole world known to medieval Europeans. Although the narrator claims firsthand experience of these places, many details and anecdotes clearly derive from earlier sources, both Classical and medieval. But whether the account is just a digest of other works, or whether its author made at least some of the journeys recounted here, is less certain. It is also unclear whether the narrative was seriously intended as an encyclopaedic summing-up of the geographical knowledge of the age, with the traveller-persona of ‘Sir John Mandeville’ being invented to provide a coherent narrative thread through this mass of information, or if it was in fact meant to be a parody of contemporary travel writing, in the spirit of Lucian’s True History.

If pilgrimage is the most common paradigm in medieval travel and travel writing, another important, and closely related, motif in this era is that of the chivalric quest. Quest romances detailing the exploits of the knights of Arthur and Charlemagne, by Chretien de Troyes and others, became popular in Europe from the twelfth century onwards; and whilst these were fictive, literary renderings of the travel theme, they established personae and narrative conventions which subsequently influenced many real travellers, and which accordingly came to be adopted in many genuine, non-fictional travel accounts.

Forms of travel writing also existed in other cultures in this period. In Chinese literature, the genres known as the yu-chi, or lyric travel account, and the jih-chi, or travel diary, were taking shape as early as the eighth century CE, and truly began to flourish from the eleventh century onwards. In the Islamic world, meanwhile, the rihla, or book recounting travel, began to emerge (see Euben 2006). Its greatest exponent would be the Moroccan qadi, or judge, Ibn Battutah, whose Travels (c.1355) describes an epic, 75,000-mile peregrination around North Africa, India, China and South East Asia.

Early Modern Travel Writing

The four voyages of Christopher Columbus, undertaken between 1492 and 1504, constitute a watershed in the history of European travel and travel writing, and a key point of transition from medieval to early modern attitudes, practices and conventions. It was the accounts of Marco Polo and Mandeville that inspired Columbus to seek out the fabulous wealth of the Far East; yet by sailing westwards to reach China, and thereby arriving at America, he dealt a considerable blow to the medieval world-view, and to its trust in the authority of Classical texts. One result of Columbus’s startling discoveries was accordingly a new emphasis on the act of eye-witnessing, of seeing for oneself and establishing facts through empirical enquiry rather than through reference to the great authors of the past. Increasingly, philosophers such as Sir Francis Bacon sought a radical reorganisation of knowledge and the principles of intellectual enquiry, insisting on the importance not only of an empirical approach, but also of an inductive method; that is to say, they emphasised the need to accumulate facts about the world prior to any attempt to deduce the laws underpinning natural phenomena. By promoting this intellectual agenda, philosophers such as Bacon laid the foundations of modern science, and they also exercised a profound influence on the development of Western travel writing.

Columbus’s voyages inaugurated an era of European discovery, led in the first instance by the navigators of Spain and Portugal. Vasco da Gama sailed from Lisbon to India via the Cape of Good Hope in 1497; in the same year, Amerigo Vespucci pushed beyond the Caribbean islands discovered by Columbus, to reach for the first time the mainland of South America; and in 1519, Ferdinand Magellan led the first successful circumnavigation of the globe. The English for their part made a somewhat belated contribution to these maritime endeavours. Francis Drake made the first English circumnavigation between 1577 and 1580, and the 1570s also witnessed the first significant English attempts to explore the New World, led by Martin Frobisher and Humphrey Gilbert, and later by figures such as Walter Ralegh and Henry Hudson.

These ventures were driven not by intellectual curiosity, but rather by a keen awareness of the opportunities they opened up for trade, conquest and colonisation, and also by the religious imperative of converting heathen peoples to Christianity. In the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, the Pope assigned the newly discovered lands beyond Europe to Portugal and Spain; the former quickly established a lucrative empire in India, South East Asia and Brazil, and the latter did likewise in central and South America. This division of the globe was contested by France, England and later Holland, who all strove to establish their own overseas dominions. Ralegh led a first, unsuccessful English settlement at Roanoke, Virginia in 1584, before the English established a second, successful colony at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. This was followed in 1620 by the Pilgrim Fathers’ settlement at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Ralegh would also lead two voyages to Guyana in South America, in 1594 and 1616, where he sought to discover El Dorado, the fabled city of gold.

These enterprises stimulated a wave of travel-related writings and documents. Aided by the spread of the printing press, maps, surveys and reports relating to the new discoveries and conquests quickly circulated in Europe, notwithstanding the attempts often made by governments to control publication of economically and strategically sensitive material. Travel writing in all its different forms gained immensely in importance, as politicians, merchants and navigators sought information to enable further expeditions. To cater to this need, and in some cases to arouse commercial and colonial ambitions amongst their compatriots, editors and publishers began to issue large-scale collections of travel accounts and documents: notable examples include Giovanni Batista Ramusio’s Navigationi et Viaggi (Voyages and Travels; 1550), Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffics and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589, with a greatly expanded second edition appearing 1598–1600) and Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625).

In this way, there began to take shape the genre that would be known for several centuries as ‘voyages and travels’. As discussed in Chapter 2, this was always a highly heterogeneous generic designation, but as a result of the growing emphasis on empirical enquiry and eye-witness observation, it was a genre increasingly centred on the report, or ‘relation’, of someone who had actually made the journey themselves. That said, few of the leading figures in this age of discovery produced their own narratives. An exception here was Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (1596), which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. Usually, however, it was left to junior members of an expedition to write up its progress and findings. Thus it was the astronomer and mathematician Thomas Harriott, a participant in Ralegh’s Roanoke venture, who published A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588). A detailed account of the marketable commodities to be found in the colony, and also of the customs of the native Algonkians, it has been described as ‘Elizabethan England’s most sophisticated and influential travel book’ (Sherman 2002: 26).

It was not only the New World that was the focus of travellers’ accounts in this era. Information was also eagerly sought about the countries and cultures of the ‘Old World’, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Travel from the British Isles to the European continent and beyond became more difficult after the Reformation, which created a rift between Protestants and Catholics, and also brought an end to many forms of pilgrimage in Protestant regions. Yet there were still many travellers who ventured abroad and subsequently recounted their experiences in print. Examples include Thomas Coryat, author of Coryat’s Crudities, Hastily gobled up in five monethes travels (1611), and seemingly the first writer to travel primarily for the sake of writing up the experience; Fynes Morison, whose Itinerary (1617) described ten years of travel through Europe and the Middle East; and William Lithgow, whose Rare Adventures & Painfull Peregrinations (1632) describe travels across Europe and as far afield as North Africa, Palestine and Egypt. As this brief list will suggest, most writers of travels in this period were men; there are no published accounts by women, reflecting both the fewer opportunities women had to travel in this era, and also the much greater difficulties they faced in becoming authors.

Coryat’s Crudities is an early example of what one might regard as a ‘literary’ mode of travel writing, a text that is meant to be enjoyed as much for its style, and for the playful self-presentation of its author, as for the information it contains. In most other travel writings of this era, the focus is very much on the traveller’s findings, and the useful data they were able to relay back to readers at home. In this they were guided by a burgeoning advice-literature, which issued directions on how to travel to best advantage, and the sort of information to record. An example is Sir Francis Bacon’s 1625 essay, ‘Of Travel’, which urged travellers to keep journals, and to attempt to learn the language of the country they were visiting.

The momentous discoveries of the early modern era inevitably sparked reflection and commentary amongst writers in Europe. In particular, the encounter with native Americans, and the often brutal treatment these natives received at the hands of Europeans, prompted much philosophical and ethical debate. Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) was a powerful indictment of the conduct of the Spanish conquistadors. It greatly influenced the French thinker Michel de Montaigne, whose essay ‘On Cannibals’ (1580) questioned the supposed superiority of European civilisation to native American ‘savagery’. Closer to home, many English commentators pondered the advisability of travel to the continent. By the latter part of the sixteenth century, it was becoming increasingly common for the sons of aristocrats and gentry to be sent to France and Italy to complete their education. This practice would evolve in time into the eighteenth-century Grand Tour. But critics argued that travel abroad simply exposed impressionable young men to moral dissolution, foreign affectation and Catholicism.

These themes and debates also rippled through the imaginative literature of the period. In fiction, Thomas More mimicked the new travel accounts to great satiric effect in Utopia (1516, and originally published in Latin), inventing an imaginary new culture that could serve as an unsettling mirror to European society. A later fiction, Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem (Another World and the Same; 1605), similarly deployed the conventions of contemporary travel literature, but did so to critique the very idea of travel, suggesting that it was a pointless and morally dangerous exercise. Also in fiction, a new genre or mode appeared that was very much predicated on travel, and that would provide a potent model in later years for some travellers and travel books. Reflecting in part the loosening of feudal bonds, and parodying the more idealistic aspirations of chivalric quest romance, picaresque fictions set a rootless, and usually disreputable, protagonist ‘on the road’, to encounter a sequence of adventures and misadventures. The genre was Spanish in origin, and arguably achieved its greatest expression in Miguel de Cervantes’s mock-heroic epic, Don Quixote (1605). But it quickly spread throughout Europe; an early English example is Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). On the stage, meanwhile, plays such as The Travels of Three English Brothers (1607), by John Day, William Rowley and George Wilkins, celebrated the achievements of Englishmen abroad, whilst Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) is at one level a subtle reflection on contemporary colonialism.

The Long Eighteenth Century, 1660–1837

‘Few books have succeeded better of late than voyages and travels’ (quoted in Leask 2002: 13). As this comment by Vicesimus Knox in 1778 suggests, travel writing proliferated in the eighteenth century, gaining a prestige and popularity which it maintained until well into the nineteenth century. This was a period in which travel books were read both for intellectual profit and for literary pleasure. Many were at the cutting-edge of contemporary scientific, political and moral debate; others again were in the vanguard of some of the period’s most important aesthetic developments. The genre also worked a crucial influence on the evolution of other literary forms in this era, such as poetry and the novel.

The proliferation of accounts of voyages and travels reflects the fact that this was an era of ever-increasing mobility, as across Europe feudalism gave way to a more commercial, embryonically capitalist society. At the same time, the technologies and infrastructures that enabled travel steadily improved. To cite just two of these advances, in 1765 John Harrison designed a chronometer that for the first time enabled longitude to be determined at sea; whilst by the early nineteenth century, the steam engine was being utilised as a means of motive power, firstly in ships and then on land, in the railway. As a consequence, more people were travelling, both within Europe and beyond, as the European exploration and colonisation of the globe continued apace. The steady expansion of print culture, moreover, meant that an increasing number of these travellers were able to publish accounts of their journeys.

For convenience, one can group the key developments in travel and travel writing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries under two main headings: exploration and tourism. For much of this period, however, these two forms of travel and travelogue were less sharply distinguished than we might today assume. At the beginning of the period especially, almost all travellers were supposed to set out in search of useful knowledge, regardless of whether they were travelling recreationally or in some professional capacity, and regardless of whether they were travelling within the British Isles, or to Europe, or to some more remote destination previously unvisited by Europeans. Travel as an information-gathering exercise was regarded as crucial arm of the New Science of the late seventeenth century, and to this end the Royal Society, founded in London in 1660, did much to promote travel and coordinate the activities of travellers. Also influential in the English-speaking world in this regard was the empiricist philosophy propounded by John Locke, most notably in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). For Locke, knowledge was generated above all by experience of the world, and as a consequence travel was soon regarded as ‘something like an obligation for the person conscientious about developing the mind and accumulating knowledge’ (Fussell 1987: 130).

The influence of the Royal Society is apparent in one of the most popular and influential travel narratives of the period, William Dampier’s New Voyage Round the World (1697). had sailed extensively in the Caribbean and the South Pacific as a ‘privateer’: essentially, a member of a non-naval vessel licensed to plunder Spanish shipping, Britain being at war with Spain at the time. In the course of his adventures, however, he had also made copious notes on the natural history of the regions he visited, and the customs of their inhabitants. At the instigation of the President of the Royal Society, these were written up into an account that established a new standard for exploratory travel writing, combining a keen eye for detail with a plain, unembellished prose style.

The New Science’s inductive agenda, and its desire to accumulate a comprehensive knowledge of the natural world, received further stimulus with the publication in 1735 of Systema Naturae (The System of Nature), by the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus. In this work, Linnaeus established a classificatory system that could seemingly be used to catalogue the whole of the natural world, and this taxonomic project was eagerly taken up in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The three voyages of Captain James Cook to the Pacific Ocean (1768–80) inaugurated an era of more overtly scientific exploration by European and American travellers. Especially noteworthy amongst these ‘explorers’, as they came to be known, are James Bruce, Mungo Park and Francois Le Vaillant in Africa; Louis Antoine de Bougainville and the Comte de La Perouse in the South Pacific; Matthew Flinders in Australia; Alexander von Humboldt in South America; and in North America, Alexander MacKenzie. In 1803, moreover, the first significant US exploratory venture got underway, Meriweather Lewis and William Clark’s overland expedition to America’s Pacific coast.

Much of this exploration was state-sponsored, or financed by organisations with close ties to contemporary policy-makers, such as, in Britain, the African Association, founded in 1788. Accordingly, it needs always to be kept in mind that although many explorers in this period trumpeted the purely scientific motivation for their travels, the knowledge and specimens they brought back were usually intended to be put to practical use, and to be harnessed to the larger economic and strategic goals of the European great powers. In this spirit, for example, Sir Joseph Banks, one of the principal patrons of exploratory endeavour in Britain, arranged the transportation of plant species around the emergent British empire, and instigated the use of Botany Bay in Australia as a penal colony. Banks was also instrumental in getting many accounts of British exploration into print, and these soon became one of the most popular branches of the voyages and travels genre.

If the scientifically motivated explorer was one distinctive new type of traveller to emerge over the course of the eighteenth century, another was the ‘tourist’. The term had been coined by the end of century, although initially it held none of the pejorative connotations that it sometimes has today. For many years, indeed, to be a tourist was a mark of conspicuous privilege. At the beginning of the period, the only form of tourism widely practised was what had been dubbed in the late seventeenth century the ‘Grand Tour’: that is to say, an extended visit, lasting sometimes as long as two years, to the European continent, and especially to France and Italy. This was a rite of passage for many young male aristocrats. The ethos and aims of the Grand Tour are well exemplified in Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), which for many years became a virtual handbook for the Grand Tourist. As well as acquiring foreign languages, the young traveller was supposed to gather useful information, in the empirical spirit of the New Science. He was also meant to visit the many remains of Roman antiquity, so as to complete his training in the classics, which in this era were seen as a key benchmark of taste and cultivation. Or at least, this was the agenda that a young tourist was supposed to follow. In practice, many devoted themselves to more frivolous or dissolute pursuits, for which they often found themselves lampooned by hostile commentators and satirists.

If it began as an elite practice, however, tourism was increasingly taken up by the emergent middle classes. From the 1760s especially, the number of middle-class travellers to the continent rose sharply. And when in the 1770s the domestic tour to regions within Britain became fashionable, this new mark of status became available to an even wider portion of British society. The growing appetite for tourism brought with it a diversification of touristic tastes, interests and itineraries. Some tourists clung to the classicism of the traditional Grand Tour; others preferred to seek out regions seemingly little touched by contemporary modernity. Many were drawn to the Scottish Highlands by the hugely popular Ossian poems (1760–65) of James McPherson, which lent a glamour both to the landscape and to the traditional customs of its inhabitants. Perhaps the most famous of these travellers was Samuel Johnson, whose Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (1775) records Johnson’s keen interest in the vanishing way of life of the Highland clans. He was accompanied by James Boswell, who later published his own Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785).

If the influence of the Ossian poems encouraged a greater aesthetic appreciation of landscape, this new taste was also stimulated by the cult of the picturesque, promoted most vigorously by the Reverend William Gilpin, who from 1782 published a series of ‘picturesque tours’. Other tourists, meanwhile, espoused an ‘improving’ agenda. Following the lead of Arthur Young, who from 1768 published a series of ‘farmer’s tours’, they aimed to identify and disseminate good agricultural practice, so as to boost the British economy. Whether ‘picturesque’ or ‘improving’ in their tastes, however, many of these tourists ventured into print, making the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in Dorothy Wordsworth’s words, a ‘tour-writing and tour-publishing age’. Most of these published accounts were by men, but there were also increasing opportunities for women both to travel and publish travelogues in this period. Only one travel account by a woman seems to have been published before 1763, Elizabeth Justice’s A Voyage to Russia (1739), although there were of course many female travellers who kept journals or wrote letters not intended for publication: examples include Celia Fiennes in Britain, and Sarah Kemble Knight in America. Between 1763 and 1800, however, some twenty female-authored travelogues appeared, by Mary Wortley Montagu, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft and others (Turner 2001: 127). After 1800, meanwhile, the number of published female travel writers rose even more dramatically, as figures such as Anna Jameson, Maria Graham and Frances Trollope made noteworthy contributions to the genre.

For the writers of touristic travelogues, travel writing’s traditional remit, that it report back useful knowledge, became ever harder to fulfil. Increasingly, there were few places in the British Isles, or in the standard Grand Tour circuit in Europe, that had not already been extensively described. One response to this predicament was to foreground the personality of the traveller, focusing less on the places visited and more on his or her subjective impressions of those places. A key influence here was Laurence Sterne’s novel A Sentimental Journey (1768), which inspired a host of real-life imitators. These ‘sentimental’ tourists sought emotional adventures that could demonstrate both their own sensibility and the fundamental benevolence of all mankind; their accounts, meanwhile, pioneered new techniques for writing about the self, and for expressing the flux of inner thoughts and feelings. It was not only touristic travelogues that adopted these techniques. Part of the appeal of Mungo Park’s enormously successful Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799), for example, was its interweaving of sentimentalist elements into the more rigorous style of an exploration narrative, as Park recorded his own affective responses to some of the predicaments he encountered.

The burgeoning of touristic travel and travel writing prompted much hostile commentary. By the early nineteenth century, the tourist had come to seem emblematic of modernity, and of the more commercial and consumerist society brought into being by the Industrial Revolution. As greater numbers began to travel recreationally, moreover, and as extensive infrastructures developed to cater to them, tourism itself began to seem an industry. In the 1830s, the publishing firms of Baedeker in Germany and John Murray in Britain began producing guidebooks for tourists in a recognisably modern form. And in the 1840s, Thomas Cook introduced the concept of the package holiday, in which an agent organised most aspects of the journey for the traveller. As tourism developed in this way, many tourists increasingly felt the need to differentiate themselves from other tourists. They sought out new styles of travel, and alternative destinations, so as to demonstrate their moral superiority and greater discrimination in taste. The beginnings of a modern ‘backpacker’ mentality, for example, is apparent in the late eighteenth-century vogue for ‘walking tours’; eager ‘pedestrians’ included William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (see Jarvis 1997). Lord Byron’s poetic travelogue Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), meanwhile, became a handbook for travellers anxious to feel they were not merely tourists, teaching them how to respond to even the most hackneyed tourist destination with a poet’s heightened sensibility.

There were of course travellers and travel accounts in this period which were neither touristic nor exploratory. Perennially popular at all levels of print culture, for example, were accounts by castaways, shipwreck victims, and captives held hostage by barbarous tribes and hostile foreign regimes (see Baepler 1999; Colley 2002; Thompson, 2007b). An early American example of this genre is Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), which recounts a period spent as a prisoner of the Wampanoag Indians in Massachusetts. In some variants this was a sensationalist literature that simply dealt in horrific suffering; in other versions, however, it was deeply infused by Protestant traditions of spiritual autobiography, often presenting a traveller’s ordeal as the route by which an errant individual rediscovered God. Another sort of religious traveller was also becoming more common by the end of the period. The Evangelical revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries led to the establishment of a number of missionary societies, and accounts of missions to ‘heathen’ tribes soon became another popular strand of the voyages and travels genre. Many in the Evangelical movement also campaigned vigorously for the abolition of slavery, and as part of this campaign published the memoirs of ex-slaves such as Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince; since these life-stories often described numerous journeys and enforced relocations, they arguably constitute the first modern travel writing by men and women of African descent, in the Western tradition at least.

It was also in this period that a distinctively American tradition of travel writing began to emerge, after the creation of the USA in 1776. Prior to that there had of course been many travel accounts produced both by colonists and by European visitors to the continent: notable examples include Thomas Harriott, John Smith and John Bartram. After independence, however, travellers who defined themselves as American began to explore both their own nation and the wider world, and the accounts they produced played an important role in forming a sense of nationhood. As Judith Hamara and Alfred Bendixen have noted, ‘travel and the construction of American identity are intimately linked’ (2009: 1). The USA is after all a nation founded by immigrants, which subsequently expanded westwards across the North American landmass, and eventually across the Pacific to Hawaii. Accounts by explorers, settlers, naturalists and missionaries did much to facilitate this expansion, whilst simultaneously giving voice to the young nation’s growing sense of cultural identity. Also contributing to this enterprise were the accounts of US travellers who journeyed around the more settled, Europeanised regions of the Eastern seaboard, and indeed those who travelled overseas, since as always the encounter with other cultures required travellers to define more clearly their own values and affiliations. Notable US travel accounts from this period include De Crèveceour’s Letters of an American Farmer (1782), the naturalist William Bartram’s Travels (1791), and Washington Irving’s various writings on both Europe and the American frontier (published between 1819 and 1837).

All this activity in the spheres of travel and travel writing was inevitably reflected in other forms of writing. As Paul Fussell notes, the imaginative literature of the age ‘is full of travelling heroes enmeshed in journey plots’ (1987: 129). The modern novel, indeed, arguably came into being as an imitation of contemporary travelogues. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) is a fictional version of the spiritual-autobiographical shipwreck narratives mentioned above, whilst Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is in part a parody of the voyage narratives produced by William Dampier and similar figures. Later novelists such as Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, meanwhile, produced many variations on the picaresque theme, in works such as Joseph Andrews (1742) and Humphrey Clinker (1771).

It was not just subject matter that these novelists derived from contemporary accounts of tours, voyages and travels: the new modes of realism that distinguish the novel from the earlier romance are significantly indebted to the plain, descriptive style developed by Dampier and others, in response to Royal Society guidelines. The descriptive rigour of contemporary exploration narratives is also an influence on much Romantic poetry later in the century, as more precise observation replaced neo-classical generalities. The theme of travel, and the traveller persona, are also central to many Romantic poems, from Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798) to Wordsworth’s Prelude (1805) and Excursion (1814), and Byron’s Childe Harold.

The Victorian and Edwardian Periods, 1837–1914

In the nineteenth century the empires of the principal European powers expanded massively, to reach their zenith in the early twentieth century. Across the same period, the USA established and consolidated its territorial control of the 48 contiguous states, and added Alaska and Hawaii to the Union in 1867 and 1898 respectively. The acquisition, governance and in some cases settlement of these new European and US dominions generated innumerable travel-related writings, from explorers, soldiers, sailors, surveyors, missionaries, merchants, scientists, colonial administrators, diplomats, journalists, artists and many others besides. As this list of occupations will suggest, the types of text they produced varied greatly, encompassing memoirs, literary travelogues, newspaper reports, campaigning tracts and a mass of purely functional documents intended for highly specialist audiences such as scientists, economists and policy-makers. Yet all of this material arguably constitutes a form of travel writing, if one accepts the looser definition of the genre outlined in Chapter 2. And almost all of it worked, sometimes directly, sometimes subtly and indirectly, to facilitate European and US expansion in this era. This was a period, for instance, in which the emergence of a spurious ‘science’ of race in the European and American academy bred a more pronounced sense of innate superiority amongst Europeans and (white) Americans, who increasingly regarded themselves as the bearers of civilisation, enlightenment and progress to supposedly primitive peoples. There were of course some dissenting voices, yet most of the travel-related writings outlined earlier were deeply suffused with these notions of cultural and racial superiority, and worked to inculcate them in their readership.

One of the most important forms of travel writing in this era of high imperialism was the exploration narrative. From Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (1839) to Alfred Russel Wallace’s accounts of the Amazon basin and the Malay archipelago (1853 and 1869 respectively), and from David Livingstone, Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley’s descriptions of the African interior to the long tradition of polar exploration associated with figures like Franklin, Peary, Amundsen and Scott, the reports of explorers supplied the intellectual centres of Europe and America with an abundance of highly useful geographical, natural-historical and ethnographic information about well-nigh every region of the globe. At the same time, they also gripped the popular imagination. Explorers came to be regarded as emblematic figures, ideal types of imperial masculinity who embodied the highest ideals of science and Christian civilisation. As we shall see in Chapter 6, their travel experiences were increasingly rendered in a stirring style that drew significantly on the literary techniques and idioms developed in another burgeoning nineteenth-century genre, the imperial adventure stories that one associates with writers like Frederick Marryat, Rudyard Kipling and Rider Haggard, and with the Boy’s Own magazine. These fictional tales of adventure in turn often drew on contemporary accounts of exploration for their settings and plots. Thus the two overlapping genres came to function as an ‘energising myth of English imperialism’, in Martin Green’s phrase (1980: 3) – that is to say, they worked to legitimate the imperial project to domestic audiences, whilst simultaneously inspiring readers with fantasies of the heroic exploits they might themselves perform in distant regions of the world.

Travel writing in less adventurous modes also proliferated in this period. Tourism flourished as never before, and a tourist infrastructure that guaranteed travellers a comparatively safe and comfortable journey was consolidated and steadily extended in both Europe and the USA. By the latter part of the century, it was possible to travel by train all the way from Paris to Istanbul, in modern-day Turkey, on the famous Orient Express. Many of the travellers who took up these new travel opportunities were stirred to write accounts of their experiences. As always with travel writing, they did so in a great variety of styles, and espoused a broad range of interests and approaches. Some offered fairly lightweight, superficial ‘sketches’ or ‘recollections’ of picturesque or exotic regions; others sought to reflect more insightfully on the destinations they had visited. Whatever their degree of intellectual or artistic accomplishment, however, many of these travellers evinced a desire to get ‘off the beaten track’, and to avoid the usual tourist itineraries (see Buzard 1993). This agenda was driven partly by a Romantic desire to visit sites of unspoilt natural beauty, and/or cultures seemingly untouched by modernity. A desire to escape the stifling moral codes of the Victorian era was also a factor for some travellers. Many Americans and North Europeans, accordingly, sought both authenticity and sensuality in the sunny climes of Italy and the Middle East. In this spirit, for example, A.W. Kinglake’s hugely popular Eothen (1844) presented the Middle East as a place where a young man might be free of the humdrum chores of domestic life, whilst for writers like Gérard de Nerval and Gustav Flaubert the region became the site of alluring erotic adventures.

Attempts to get off the beaten track were also often motivated by a desire to escape one’s fellow tourists, who thronged in unprecedented numbers to established destinations. Another recurrent feature of many Victorian travelogues, accordingly, is an anti-touristic rhetoric that seeks to distinguish the author from the more vulgar tourist ‘herd’. This impulse is also one reason why the inward turn in some modes of travel writing, as discussed earlier in relation to Sterne, becomes even more marked in the Victorian era. By shifting attention away from the scenes being witnessed and on to the narratorial self that was doing the witnessing, many Victorian travel writers sought to signal a sensibility, and an intellectual and emotional cultivation, superior to that of other tourists.

This last development is also bound up with the emergence, in the nineteenth century, of the more self-consciously ‘literary’ mode of travel writing that I earlier labelled the modern travel book. In this regard, it is significant that the Victorian era saw many writers with established reputations in other literary genres take up the travelogue form. Thus the French novelist Stendhal wrote Memoirs of a Tourist (1838), whilst Charles Dickens produced American Notes (1842) and Pictures from Italy (1846), and Mark Twain the hugely popular The Innocents Abroad (1869). Many of these literary travelogues were intended to be read as much for the quality of the writing they contained, and for the insights they offered into the idiosyncratic personalities of their authors, as for the useful information they contained about the places being described. Or, alternatively, they claimed to capture impressionistically or poetically the ‘spirit’ of a place or culture, rather than offer a comprehensive, factual account of it. Thus in one branch of the travel writing genre, it was style and aesthetic effect rather than factual information that was increasingly prioritised by writers, and valorised by critics and readers.

Women writers also made a significant contribution to the travel writing genre in the Victorian period, although this required them to negotiate the highly constraining norms of femininity that operated in this era (see Morgan 1996; Schriber 1997). Figures like Isabella Bird, Marianne North, May French Sheldon, Mary Kingsley and Anna Leonowens ventured well beyond the standard tourist circuits of their day. Some of these women, indeed, were engaged in activities close in spirit to exploration, although they did not usually present themselves in this light: the heroic title of ‘explorer’ was a male preserve in this period. Yet Bird and Kingsley were eventually admitted as Fellows to the Royal Geographical Society and the Anthropological Society respectively, in recognition of their contributions to natural history and ethnography. The majority of female travellers, like the majority of male travellers in this period, were of course far less adventurous than figures like Bird and Kingsley. Many nevertheless produced accounts of their travels, covering the spectrum from largely inconsequential sketches and reminiscences to more substantial interventions in contemporary aesthetic, intellectual and political debates. Notable writers in this regard include Flora Tristan, Isabelle Eberhardt, Catherine Parr Traill, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Martineau, Louisa Ann Meredith, Gertrude Bell and Edith Wharton.

As in earlier periods, finally, the travel theme, and the depiction of foreign peoples and places, was also frequently taken up by writers working in more obviously imaginative or fictive genres. The assumptions of cultural and moral superiority that underpinned the European imperial project are powerfully critiqued in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), for example, although the novella is itself not free of prejudicial attitudes to Africa and Africans. Herman Melville in Typee (1846) and R.L. Stevenson in his South Sea tales are amongst the many writers of fiction who take the South Pacific and its inhabitants as their theme; and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) is just one of many novels which brought India vividly to life for European and American readers. Travel is also a frequent theme and motif in much poetry in this era, in works such as A.H. Clough’s Amours de Voyage (1848), Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of the Open Road’ (1856), and even, in a more symbolic and/or nonsensical vein, Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘Le bateau ivre’ (‘The Drunken Boat’; 1871) and Edward Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat’ (1871). As always, these fictive and poetic accounts of travel often drew on contemporary travel writing not only in their content but also in their style, form and imagery. And as always, some of these literary texts exercised in turn a significant influence on subsequent travel accounts, by shaping travellers’ attitudes to other peoples and places.

Travel Writing from 1914 to the Present

With the creation and steady expansion of the European and American railway networks, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, a wholly new mode of transportation became widely available in these two continents. The railway journey introduced travellers to a new sense of speed, and a new sense of disorientation, as the landscape in the immediate foreground of a window-view sped by in a blur. It also radically adjusted the Western sense of space and time and, by so doing, Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1986) has argued, it played a key role in generating a distinctively modern, industrialised mode of consciousness. The tyranny of distance was further defeated in the twentieth century by the motor car and the aeroplane, two new technologies of travel which again introduced travellers to new sensory experiences. And as the use of trains, planes and automobiles steadily grew across the twentieth century, so travel increasingly became a mass activity, available to almost all members of Western society; a development that some commentators have regarded as a laudable democratisation of travel, and others as a deplorable vulgarisation.

These new technologies contributed significantly to a dramatic increase in what one might label global interconnectedness, the sheer volume of exchanges and transactions between the different regions and different cultures of the world. In this regard, it is worth noting that our modern age of globalisation has its origins in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century era of high imperialism, when the constant capitalist quest for new markets, products and resources established many of the global networks of trade and travel that exist today. The first major cultural movement in the West in the twentieth century, Modernism, is very much a product of the more mobile and more globalised society that thus came into being. Writers and artists such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad and Pablo Picasso were themselves émigrés, living much of their adult lives outside the nations of their birth. With its emphasis on fragmentation, unexpected juxtapositions and abrupt jumps from one image to another, meanwhile, much Modernist literature and art bears the imprint of the faster lifestyle and the disorientating kinesis that is seemingly characteristic of modernity. Many Modernist writers and artists were also deeply fascinated by the ‘primitive’ societies described by explorers and anthropologists, and by primitive artefacts and artworks, examples of which had accumulated in the metropolitan centres of the West as a consequence of imperialism. In the wake of Sigmund Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis, these works were frequently regarded in the West as expressive not only of human society in an earlier stage of cultural development, but also of primal desires and appetites that were repressed or sublimated in Western art and culture. Viewed in this way, so-called primitive art was often disturbing yet liberating to European and American sensibilities, and for artists such as Picasso it pointed the way to new modes of artistic expression.

Given this larger context, it is unsurprising that travel writing flourished in the years between the First and Second World Wars, both in experimental, Modernist modes and in more traditional forms. Critically acclaimed travelogues of the 1920s included T.E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), D.H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia (1921) and Mornings in Mexico (1927) and André Gide’s Voyage au Congo (Voyage to the Congo; 1927). The genre also remained popular with the general reader, with middle-brow travel writers such as Rosita Forbes, H.V. Morton and Richard Halliburton achieving great commercial success. Travel writing’s appeal grew still further in the 1930s, which is often regarded as a golden age of literary travel writing, especially in Britain (see Fussell 1980). In a decade that witnessed a global economic depression, the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, and ultimately the outbreak of the Second World War, the travelogue seemed to enable a more direct engagement with worldly affairs and with politics than was possible in the traditional literary genres. Figures such as George Orwell, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Peter Fleming, Robert Byron, Ernest Hemingway, Rebecca West and Freya Stark accordingly took up the travel writing genre, and utilised it to diverse ends: as a form of political and cultural commentary (in the case of Orwell and West); as a source of comic adventures (Fleming and Waugh); or as a means of exploring subjectivity, memory and the unconscious (Greene). Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937), meanwhile, creates a dazzling collage-like effect through its interweaving of fragmentary notes, brief vignettes and a variety of documentary sources such as passport visas and newspaper cuttings; this formal inventiveness has led some critics to hail the book as the greatest masterpiece of 1930s travel writing, and indeed, of travel writing generally (see Fussell 1980: 95; Chatwin 1989: 286). Formal experimentation was also to the fore in W.H. Auden and Louis Macniece’s Letters from Iceland (1937), and Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s Journey to a War (1939), both of which mingle verse and prose.

The strong British tradition of literary travel writing was continued in the post-war era by writers such as Eric Newby, Norman Lewis, Colin Thubron, Jan Morris and Patrick Leigh Fermor, and also by the Irish writer Dervla Murphy. Their travelogues obviously embrace a variety of interests and tonal registers: Lewis’s travel writing, for example, is often journalistic in style, while Fermor and Thubron typically adopt a more effusive, lyrical voice. Yet prevalent in much British travel writing of both the 1930s and the post-war era is a self-deprecating persona, and a strategy of understatement that presents the narrator in ironic and belated counterpoint to the more overtly heroic travel writing of Victorian explorers like Stanley and Burton. There is also a distinctly patrician air to this branch of travel writing, amongst the male writers especially. Many were privately educated at elite schools, and had strong links with the political and cultural establishments of their day; their freedom to roam the globe was accordingly predicated to some extent on the privileges accruing from their social standing. More or less contemporaneously, however, Jack Kerouac pioneered in America a very different idiom in travel writing. Although ostensibly novels, works such as On the Road (1951) and Dharma Bums (1958) were clearly lightly fictionalised accounts of Kerouac’s own travel experiences; they established a picaresque, low-life agenda, and a fast-paced ‘hipster’ style that would become the hallmarks of a self-consciously alternative, counter-cultural tradition in travel writing.

Whilst literary and journalistic travelogues flourished in the twentieth century, another branch of the travel writing genre – the narrative of scientific exploration – gradually fell into abeyance. In this regard, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (1922), a description of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition in 1910–13, arguably represents the culmination of, and an elegy for, the nineteenth-century cult of the explorer. The conspicuous heroics of figures like Stanley, which was predicated in part on an immense self-belief as to the West’s intellectual and moral superiority over the rest of the world, became increasingly unpalatable after the horrors of two world wars, and during the era of decolonisation that followed the Second World War. Increasingly, moreover, there remained fewer and fewer ‘undiscovered’ regions that required exploration. And where exploratory work of this sort was required, it was increasingly undertaken by professional scientists and social scientists who were usually concerned to distinguish their writings from those of mere travel writers. Thus Claude Lévi-Strauss, perhaps the most influential anthropologist of the twentieth century, declares bluntly at the beginning of Tristes Tropiques (Sad Tropics; 1955): ‘I hate travelling and explorers’ (1973: 1). He means he detests writers who produce colourful narratives of their personal travel experiences, full of incident, anecdote and subjective impressions, rather than simply presenting, in methodologically rigorous fashion, the ethnographic data and theories generated by their travels. In the case of Tristes Tropiques, this is a somewhat paradoxical declaration; as Lévi-Strauss immediately acknowledges, he does ‘tell the story of [his] expeditions’ in this particular volume, and is thus himself writing a sort of travelogue (1973: 1). Most of his writings, however, are aimed at scientific specialists rather than the general reader, and eschew the anecdotalism and subjectivism that was by now strongly associated with travel writing.

This development was already underway in the nineteenth century, when there were many in the scientific establishment who looked askance at what they perceived as the showmanship and sensationalism of figures like Stanley and Burton. Yet in that period there were still many accounts in which genuinely new scientific and ethnographic information was integrated within a narrative that simultaneously gave literary pleasure to the reader. This synthesis became increasingly hard to maintain in the twentieth century, especially after the Second World War, although there were arguably some writers who tried to keep alive this agenda: Wilfred Thesiger is perhaps an example. Instead, the vast array of interests and agendas catered to by the older ‘voyages and travels’ genre was divided up between, on the one hand, the different scientific and social-scientific disciplines in the academy and, on the other, the spheres of literature and popular entertainment. This may in part explain why the very term ‘voyages and travels’ gave way, around the start of the twentieth century, to our modern label for the genre, ‘travel writing’. The change in terminology was accompanied by a loss in intellectual status and cultural prestige, as the term ‘travel writing’ came to mean, in the eyes of many commentators, just the more literary, journalistic or middle-brow forms of travelogue.

As a consequence, and notwithstanding the success of the 1930s generation of writers, travel writing was firmly relegated in the twentieth century to the status of a ‘minor’ genre. The genre’s critical and commercial fortunes seem especially to have flagged in the decades immediately after the Second World War. Critical and popular interest in the form was rekindled, however, in the late 1970s. This period witnessed a flurry of commercially successful, and in some cases highly innovative travelogues, the most significant being Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train through Asia (1975) and The Old Patagonian Express (1979), Peter Matthiesen’s The Snow Leopard (1975), Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977) and Robyn Davidson’s Tracks (1980). This period also saw the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). A ground-breaking academic study of the way in which Western writers habitually depicted the cultures of the so-called ‘Middle’ and ‘Far’ East, Orientalism was enormously influential in awakening scholarly interest in travel writing, a genre that had previously been little studied.

Since Said, whose influence will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6, the academic study of travel writing has burgeoned. So too, of course, has the travel writing genre itself. The spread of the internet, for example, has arguably produced a wholly new mode of travel writing in the form of the travel ‘blog’, or weblog. Bypassing the traditional need for publication in print culture, travel blogs represent a subtle re-negotiation of the boundary between public and private communication. They have also greatly escalated the volume of travel writing being yearly produced, although of course the quality of this on-line material varies enormously. And so travel writing continues to flourish and to reinvent itself, both in new media and in more traditional forms, so as to reflect new patterns of global travel, and new global concerns.