TRAVEL THEORY
Vanreyssa González Del Valle
TRAVEL THEORY
Interest in travel and travel writing has emerged as the result of
an intellectual climate that is interrogating imperialism,
colonialism, postcolonialism, ethnography, diaspora,
multiculturalism, nationalism, identity, visual culture, and map
theory. Travel theory's lexicon includes such words as
transculturation, metropolitan center, "imperial eyes," contact
zones, border crossing, tourist/traveler, imperial frontier,
hybridity, margin, expatriation/repatriation,
cosmopolitanism/localism, museology, displacement,
home/abroad, arrival/return, road narrative, and diaspora, to
name just a few.
TRAVEL LITERATURE
Travel literature is travel writing of literary value. Travel literature
typically records the experiences of an author touring a place for the
pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue
or itinerary. Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in
focus, or may involve travel to different regions within the same
country. Accounts of spaceflight may also be considered travel
literature.
Literary travelogues generally exhibit a coherent narrative or aesthetic
beyond the logging of dates and events as found in travel journals or a
ship's log. Travel literature is closely associated with outdoor literature
and the genres often overlap with no definite boundaries. Another subgenre, invented in the 19th century, is the guide book.
TRAVELOGUES
The Americans, Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson and William Least HeatMoon, Welsh author Jan Morris and Englishman Eric Newby are or
were widely acclaimed as travel writers although Morris is also a
historian and Theroux a novelist.
Travel literature often intersects with essay writing, as in V. S. Naipaul's
India: A Wounded Civilization, where a trip becomes the occasion for
extended observations on a nation and people. This is similarly the case
in Rebecca West's work on Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
Sometimes a writer will settle into a locality for an extended period,
absorbing a sense of place while continuing to observe with a travel
writer's sensibility. Examples of such writings include Lawrence
Durrell's Bitter Lemons, Deborah Tall's The Island of the White Cow
and Peter Mayle's best-selling A Year in Provence and its sequels.
TRAVELOGUES
Travel and nature writing merge in many of the works by Sally
Carrighar, Ivan T. Sanderson and Gerald Durrell. These authors are
naturalists, who write in support of their fields of study. Charles
Darwin wrote his famous account of the journey of HMS Beagle at the
intersection of science, natural history and travel.
Literary travel writing also occurs when an author, famous in another
field, travels and writes about his or her experiences. Examples of such
writers are Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, Mary Wollstonecraft,
Robert Louis Stevenson, Hilaire Belloc, D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca West
and John Steinbeck.
FICTION
Fictional travelogues make up a large proportion of travel literature.
Although it may be desirable in some contexts to distinguish fictional
from non-fictional works, such distinctions have proved notoriously
difficult to make in practice, as in the famous instance of the travel
writings of Marco Polo or John Mandeville. Many "fictional" works of
travel literature are based on factual journeys – Joseph Conrad's Heart
of Darkness and presumably, Homer's Odyssey (c. 8th cent. BCE) –
while other works, though based on imaginary and even highly fantastic
journeys – Dante's Divine Comedy, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels,
Voltaire's Candide or Samuel Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Prince
of Abissinia – nevertheless contain factual elements.
PHOTOS