Travel Writing Essay

By extensi on, it also reveals something of the culture from which that writer has come, and/or the culture for which their text is intended. Accounts of travel inevitably reveal the culture-specific and individual patterns of perception and knowledge which every tr aveller brings to the travelled world. This explanation has its own set of question s like: are all forms of writing that can emerge from the travel experience to be classif ied as travel writing? Some readers will not be inclined to class a mere list or catalo gue of data as travel writing, and a similar hesitation will probably be felt towards ma ny other texts that undoubtedly have their origins in, and to some extent report ba ck on, a traveller’s negotiation of otherness. What

What of a novel where tr avel is a theme? Are all of these texts to be seen as distant from travel writing? An d if we keep the latter course, adopting what criteria do we exclude these texts fr om the travel writing genre? These two sets of questions shall be used as guiding prin ciples for exploration into the genre of Travel Writing for this research endeavour.

Travel writing has always maintained heterogeneity – a complex and confusing relationship – with any number of closely related and often overlapping genres. As Jonathan Raban notes,

Travel writing is a notoriously raffish open house where different genres are likely to end up in the same bed. It accommodates the private diary, the essay, the short story, the prose poem, the rough note and polished table talk with indiscriminate hospitality.

(Thompson 11)

Commenting on the formal diversity, thematic and to nal range, Patrick

Holland and Graham Huggan, surveyed travel writing in the late twentieth century

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and stressed that the form can embrace everything ‘ from picaresque adventure to philosophical treatise, political commentary, ecolo gical parable, and spiritual quest,’ while simultaneously ‘borrow[ing] freely from histo ry, geography, anthropology

Some commentators take the term ‘travel writing’ to mean just the material that tends to be classified in bookshops as ‘Travel Literature’; this is perhaps especially the case in studies concerned principall y with modern travel writing, and with travel accounts produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Paul Fussell in his Norton Anthology of Travel (1987), introduced into the scholarly discussion o f both travel and travel writing a set of taxonomical distinctions and categories that are still widely used today, though problematic. For F ussell, the term ‘travel writing’ implicitly equates with the literary form he prefer s to call the ‘travel book’. Fussell insists that the proper travel book needs to be sha rply distinguished from other forms of travel-related text, such as the exploration acc ount and especially, the guidebook.

According to Fussell, the following points can be t he formal and/or thematic features for a travel book:

i) These publications are almost invariably extended p rose narratives, often broken up into chapters, and in this way they gener ally resemble novels than guide books. ii) Travel books, meanwhile, may include illustrative m aterial, such as