The genre of travel literature or travelogue encompasses outdoor literature, guide books, nature writing, and travel memoirs. Throughout history, many authors have contributed works to this genre through different forms of writing: poems, books, memoirs, biographies, novels, journals, online blogs, etc. Knowledge on key historic events, like slavery in the United States, have been expanded on through publishing and discoveries of personal travel accounts and literature. Authors native to a location or visiting from abroad make contributions to the local tourism through travel literature. Some travel literature is fictional adventures influenced by the author's personal experiences, while others, like guidebooks, only contain factual information about a given location. Historically, most travel narratives and guides were printed text, but in more modern years, many examples of travel literature can be found on the internet as travel blogs and informational websites.
History
Early examples of travel literature include the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (generally considered a 1st-century CE work; authorship is debated), Pausanias' Description of Greece in the 2nd century CE, Safarnama (Book of Travels) by Nasir Khusraw (1003–1077), the Journey Through Wales (1191) and Description of Wales (1194) by Gerald of Wales, and the travel journals of Ibn Jubayr (1145–1214), Marco Polo (1254–1354), and Ibn Battuta (1304–1377), all of whom recorded their travels across the known world in detail. As early as the 2nd century CE, Lucian of Samosata discussed history and travel writers who added embellished, fantastic stories to their works. The travel genre was a fairly common genre in medieval Arabic literature.
In China, 'travel record literature' () became popular during the Song dynasty (960–1279).Hargett 1985, pp. 67. Travel writers such as Fan Chengda (1126–1193) and Xu Xiake (1587–1641) incorporated a wealth of geographical and topographical information into their writing, while the 'daytrip essay' Record of Stone Bell Mountain by the noted poet and statesman Su Shi (1037–1101) presented a philosophical and moral argument as its central purpose. Chinese travel literature of this period was written in a variety of different styles, including narratives, prose, essays and diaries, although most were written in prose.Hargett 1985, pp. 67–93. Zhou Daguan's account of Cambodia in the thirteenth century is among the major sources for the city of Angkor in its prime.
One of the earliest known records of taking pleasure in travel, of travelling for the sake of travel and writing about it, is Petrarch's (1304–1374) ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336. He states that he went to the mountaintop for the pleasure of seeing the top of the famous height. His companions who stayed at the bottom he called frigida incuriositas ("a cold lack of curiosity"). He then wrote about his climb, making allegorical comparisons between climbing the mountain and his own moral progress in life.
, a poet for the Duke of Burgundy, travelled through the Jura Mountains in 1430 and recorded his personal reflections, his horrified reaction to the sheer rock faces, and the terrifying thunderous cascades of mountain streams. Antoine de la Sale (), author of Petit Jehan de Saintre, climbed to the crater of a volcano in the Lipari Islands in 1407, leaving us with his impressions. "Councils of mad youth" were his stated reasons for going. In the mid-15th century, Gilles le Bouvier, in his Livre de la description des pays, gave us his reason to travel and write:
By the 16th century, accounts to travels to India and Persia had become common enough that they had been compiled into collections such as the ("New World") by Simon Grynaeus, and collections by Ramusio and Richard Hakluyt. 16th century travelers to Persia included the brothers Robert Shirley and Anthony Shirley, and for India Duarte Barbosa, Ralph Fitch, Ludovico di Varthema, Cesare Federici, and Jan Huyghen van Linschoten. Humanist travellers in Europe also produced accounts, often noting monuments and inscriptions, e.g., Seyfried Rybisch's Itinerarium (1570s), Michel de Montaigne's Journal de voyage (1581), Voyage d'Italie (1585) and Aernout van Buchel's Iter Italicum (1587–1588).
In the 18th century, travel literature was commonly known as "books of travels", which mainly consisted of maritime diaries.Stolley 1992, p. 26. In 18th-century Britain, travel literature was highly popular, and almost every famous writer worked in the travel literature form;Fussell 1963, p. 54. Gulliver's Travels (1726), for example, is a social satire imitating one, and Captain James Cook's diaries (1784) were the equivalent of today's best-sellers.Glyndwr Williams, Captain Cook's Voyages: 1768–1779. London: The Folio Society, 1997, p. xxxii. Alexander von Humboldt's Personal narrative of travels to the equinoctial regions of America, during the years 1799–1804, originally published in French, was translated to multiple languages and influenced later naturalists, including Charles Darwin.
Other later examples of travel literature include accounts of the Grand Tour: aristocrats, clergy, and others with money and leisure time travelled Europe to learn about the art and architecture of its past. One tourism literature pioneer was Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) with An Inland Voyage (1878), and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879), about his travels in the Cévennes (France), is among the first popular books to present hiking and camping as recreational activities, and tells of commissioning one of the first sleeping bags.Travel with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879); Re the first sleeping bag in 1876
Other notable writers of travel literature in the 19th century include the Russian Ivan Goncharov, who wrote about his experience of a tour around the world in Frigate "Pallada" (1858), and Lafcadio Hearn, who interpreted the culture of Japan with insight and sensitivity.Nonfictional prose: Travel and epistolary literature Encyclopedia Britannica
The 20th century's interwar period has been described as a heyday of travel literature when many established writers such as Graham Greene, Robert Byron, Rebecca West, Freya Stark, Peter Fleming and Evelyn Waugh were traveling and writing notable travel books.Casey Blanton Travel Writing, Routledge 2013
In the late 20th century there was a surge in popularity of travel writing, particularly in the English-speaking world with writers such as Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Jonathan Raban, Colin Thubron, and others. While travel writing previously had mainly attracted interest by historians and biographers, critical studies of travel literature now also developed into an academic discipline in its own right.Alasdair Pettinger Travel Writing Oxford Bibliographies
Travel books
Travel books come in styles ranging from the documentary, to the literary, as well as the journalistic, and from memoir to the humorous to the serious. They are often associated with tourism and include guide books. Travel writing may be found on web sites, in periodicals, on blogs and in books. It has been produced by a variety of writers, including travelers, military officers, missionaries, explorers, scientists, pilgrims, social and physical scientists, educators, and migrants.
Travelogues are a special kind of texts that sometimes are disregarded in the literary world. They weave together aspects of memoir, non-fiction, and occasionally even fiction to produce a story that is equally about the trip and the goal. Throughout history, people have told stories about their travels like the ancient tales of explorers and pilgrims, as well as blogs and vlogs in recent time. A "factual" piece detailing a trip to a distant country is that the travelogue emerged as a significant item in late nineteenth-century newspapers. Short stories genre of that era were influenced directly and significantly by the travelogues that shared many traits with short stories. Authors generally, especially Henry James and Guy de Maupassant, frequently wrote travelogues and short tales concurrently, often using the same countries as their settings.
Travel literature often intersects with philosophy or essay writing, as in V. S. Naipaul's India: A Wounded Civilization (1976), whose trip became the occasion for extended observations on a nation and people. This is similarly the case in Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941),West, Rebecca, intr. Geoff Dyer, (2006). Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia. Edinburgh. focused on her journey through Yugoslavia, and in Robin Esrock's series of books about his discoveries in Canada, Australia and around the globe. Fictional travel narratives may also show this tendency, as in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) or Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974).
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 (1957), Bruce Chatwin's widely acclaimed In Patagonia (1977) and The Songlines (1987),Albin Krebs Bruce Chatwin, 48, Travel Writer And Author of 'Songlines,' Dies New York Times January 19, 1989 Deborah Tall's The Island of the White Cow: Memories of an Irish Island (1986),Bonnie Gross, "'White Cow` Absorbing Account Of Irish Island The Island Of The White Cow: Memories Of An Irish Island. By Deborah Tall". March 2, 1986, News/Sun-Sentinel. and Peter Mayle's best-selling A Year in Provence (1989) and its sequels.
Travel and nature writing merge in many of the works by Sally Carrighar, Gerald Durrell and Ivan T. Sanderson. Sally Carrighar's works include One Day at Teton Marsh (1965), Home to the Wilderness (1973), and Wild Heritage (1965). Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals (1956) is an autobiographical work by the British naturalist. It tells of the years that he lived as a child with his siblings and widowed mother on the Greek island of Corfu between 1935 and 1939. It describes the life of the Durrell family in a humorous manner, and explores the fauna of the island. It is the first and most well-known of Durrell's "Corfu trilogy", together with Birds, Beasts, and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods (1978).
Ivan T. Sanderson published Animal Treasure, a report of an expedition to the jungles of then-British West Africa; Caribbean Treasure, an account of an expedition to Trinidad, Haiti, and Surinam, begun in late 1936 and ending in late 1938; and Living Treasure, an account of an expedition to Jamaica, British Honduras (now Belize) and the Yucatán. These authors are naturalists, who write in support of their fields of study.
Another naturalist, Charles Darwin, wrote his famous account of the journey of HMS Beagle at the intersection of science, natural history and travel."Review of Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of H.M.S. Adventure and Beagle between the Years 1826 and 1836 ... & Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the various Countries visited by H.M.S. Beagle ...". The Quarterly Review. 65: 194–234. December 1839.