Travel Writing, Geography and

Human geographers have a long-standing and rather basic interest in “travel” insofar as travel of a sort is assumed within a wide range of people's movements, from large-scale migration flows and settlement patterns to a host of everyday activities such as the journey to work. However, studies of travel writing—written representations of journeys and experiences away from home—form a distinct but eclectic body of critical scholarship that helps us to understand relationships between places traveled from and places traveled to. Descriptions of people, places, and experiences in travel writing also provide a window to the effect that travel has on the personal subjectivity of the writer. Popular mainstream interest in travel writing underwent a renaissance of sorts during the late 20th century, as display counter after display counter at bookstores attested to the newly commodified forms of travel and tourism. Scholars of travel writing, working in a range of disciplines such as literary criticism, anthropology, geography, social history, and postcolonial and cultural studies, have been concerned with travel writing as both cultural practice and cultural product. Importantly, they recognize that travel texts do not merely reflect some taken-for-granted reality about places; they also help to constitute that reality.

A heterogeneous array of texts might be categorized as travel writing, including exploration accounts, settler diaries and letters, war correspondence, reports of religious pilgrimages, wilderness and nature writing, and the travel sections of newspapers and magazines. Nonetheless, many scholars recognize travel writing or the “travel book” as a historical genre that emerged during the 18th- and 19th-century bourgeois era. Thus, travel writing was distinguished as “autobiography in motion,” that is, a type of text that combines a narrative figure as protagonist (whether foregrounded or impersonal) with descriptions of places, people, events, and objects. The emergence of the travel book or essay coincided with new forms of mass transportation (especially the steamship and railroad during the 19th century), new wealth available to a leisure class of travelers concerned with their own self-improvement and education, and new global relationships and interactions that provided contexts for travel. Examples included working in colonial administration, visiting relatives who had emigrated, and visiting fashionable tourist destinations, such as Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks, accessible through the transcontinental “grand tour” of North America by railroad.

Mode of transportation affects the travel experience and thus can produce new types of travel writing and perhaps even new “identities.” Modes of transportation determine the types and duration of social encounters; affect the organization and passage of space and time; determine itineraries, destinations, rhythms of travel; and also affect perception and knowledge—how and what the traveler comes to know and write about. The completion of the first U.S. transcontinental highway during the 1920s (Route 30, the “Lincoln Highway”), for example, inaugurated a new genre of travel literature about the United States—the automotive or road narrative. Such narratives highlight the experiences of mostly male protagonists “discovering themselves” on their journeys, emphasizing the independence of road travel and the value of rural folk traditions.

Travel writing's relationship to empire building—as a type of “colonialist discourse”—has drawn the most attention from academicians. Close connections have been observed between European (and American) political, economic, and administrative goals for the colonies and their manifestations in the cultural practice of writing travel books. Travel writers' descriptions of foreign places have been analyzed as attempts to validate, promote, or challenge the ideologies and practices of colonial or imperial domination and expansion. Mary Louise Pratt's study of the genres and conventions of 18th- and 19th-century exploration narratives about South America and Africa (e.g., the “monarch of all I survey” trope) offered ways of thinking about travel writing as embedded within relations of power between metropole and periphery, as did Edward Said's theories of representation and cultural imperialism. Particularly Said's book, Orientalism, [Page 504]helped scholars understand ways in which representations of people in travel texts were intimately bound up with notions of self, in this case, that the Occident defined itself through essentialist, ethnocentric, and racist representations of the Orient. Said's work became a model for demonstrating cultural forms of imperialism in travel texts, showing how the political, economic, or administrative fact of dominance relies on legitimating discourses such as those articulated through travel writing.

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