Introduction

Travel literature is one such genre as holds a great literary value and has been hitherto less known to us. It was in 1990s that the systematic study of travel literature emerged as a legitimate field of scholarly enquiry with its own conferences, organizations, journals, monographs, anthologies, and encyclopaedias. The study of travel writing developed most extensively in the late 1990s, encouraged by the currency of Foucauldian criticism and Edward

Said’s postcolonial landmark study Orientalism. This growing interdisciplinary preoccupation with cultural diversity, globalization, and migration is expressed in other fields of literary study, most notably Comparative Literature. The first international travel writing conference,

“Snapshots from Abroad”, organized by Donald Ross at the University of Minnesota in 1997, attracted over one hundred scholars and led to the foundation of the International Society for

Travel Writing (ISTW). The first issue of Studies in Travel Writing was published the same year, edited by Tim Youngs. Annual scholarly conferences about travel writing, held in the USA,

Europe and Asia, saw an unprecedented upswing in the number of published travel literature monographs and essay collections, as well as a proliferation of travel writing anthologies.

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 limits of time and space. Travel literature is closely associated with outdoor literature and the genres often overlap with no definite boundaries.The Americans, Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson and William Least Heat-Moon, Welsh author Jan Morris and Englishman Eric Newby are 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 its 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.

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. 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, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hilaire Belloc, D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca West and John

Steinbeck.

Fictional travelogues make up a large proportion of travel literature. 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. One contemporary example of a real life journey transformed into a work of fiction is travel writer Kira Salak's novel, The White Mary, which takes place in Papua New Guinea and the Congo and is largely based on her own experiences in those countries.

The systematic study of travel literature leads to a penetrating insight into the field of criticism. Among the most important critical works on travel literature are: Abroad (1980) by

Paul Russell, an exploration of British interwar travel writing as escapism; Gone Primitive:

Modern Intellects, Savage Minds (1990) by Marianna Torgovnick, an inquiry into the primitivist presentation 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 nineteenth 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.

Not only criticism, the growing interdisciplinary preoccupation with cultural diversity, globalization, migration and ecology is also expressed in the genre of travel literature. Major directions in recent travel writing scholarship include: studies about the role of gender in travel and travel writing (e.g. Women Travelers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze

[1998] by Indira Ghose); explorations of the political functions of travel (e.g. Radicals on the

Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s [2001] by Bernard Schweizer); postcolonial perspectives on travel (e.g. English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to

Postcolonial Explorations (2000) by Barbara Korte); and studies about the function of language in travel and travel writing (e.g. Across the Lines: Travel, Language, and Translation [2000] by

Michael Cronin).