What is travel writing?

Travel writing is a broad and always shifting genre. A journal and even the captivity literature - as dramatic as it is - are also forms of travel writing.  

Now most of what we have is tourism related, but travel literature didn't begin with tourism. It began with pilgrims and immigrants. Many advice to differentiate the traveler from the tourist, because the second one is the Flâneur of our times, a casual stroller. 

Curious that many old travel stories were works of fiction based on real stuff. And sometimes the tales were not written by the protagonists. For example, the writer of romances Rustichello da Pisa wrote the travel stories of Marco Polo. 

Some interesting cases:

  • The travels of the Galician Egeria to the Holy Land in the 4th century.
  • The Basque Catalina de Erauso.
  • Swiss adventurer Isabelle Eberhardt.
  • Mandeville's The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.
  • Thomas More's Utopia.

There is no foreign land; it is only the traveler that is foreign.

          Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters.  


References: 

Peter Hume and Tim Youngs, The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. 

Mary Baine Campbell, "Travel Writing and its Theory"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chekika: Forgotten spot of Everglades National Park close to Miami

Image
During our last visit to Chekika ( map ), we found closed roads and dilapidated buildings. This was our fourth time here. Little by little, nature is coming back. Wilderness taking over what was always its property.            The closed entrance to the Grossman Hammock -  License our images here .   Everglades National Park closed indefinitely the Chekika Day Use Area in 2013. They claimed budget constraints. One year later, Chekika was on the news when a juvenile Nile crocodile was removed from the area - the animal was captured in a canal north from the Grossman Hammock. Two others were caught in 2009 and 2012 further to the east. You know the script with invasive species: they escaped, or someone released them.  The Everglades already have the mighty Pythons running wild. I don’t want to imagine the River of Grass ruled by “man-eaters” crocodiles that can reach up to 17 feet. That would be madness. 
More »

Google search and the little blog

Image
Many small websites are going dark like the sands of the desert at nightfall -  License our images here .   Little blogs are dying. They are jailed in a dark and remote dungeon of Google organic search, the non-index dungeon. The mighty gatekeeper, like Saturn , is devouring its children. Betrayed for money, the good old-fashioned blogs are the collateral damage of their "helpful" content update. Long gone is that 2004 when Loren Baker wrote: Google likes Blogs. Blogs do well in Search Results Listings on Google. This is because Blogs contain fresh content and are richly interlinked, despite their relatively small audiences. Some would go so far as to say that Google over-represents Blogs. (Source:  What if Google didn't like blogs? ") That's ancient history. A jump to 2022 shows a different picture. According to Sandy Maguire: The Internet is dominated by a few big websites. Out of social, the amateur opinion is vanished. (Source: " Why Is the Web So Monoto
More »

Ernest Hemingway's "Oklahoma": "All of the Indians are dead (a good Indian is a dead Indian)"

Image
Page of an edition of "Three Stories & Ten Poems" from Ernest Hemingway.  Here we go with Hemingway poetry. Harsh. But we know what to expect from his sharp journalistic prose and  iceberg theory .  "Oklahoma" was published in 1923 in Three Stories & Ten Poems   - affiliate link to Amazon . The name says it all: the "Oklahoma" of the Choctaw language - means "red people" -, and Oklahoma the state seen through its genesis, the Indian Territory .  American Indians or Native American - whatever suits you, but many of them prefer the first name - in their new way of life.   Now to the poem.  All of the Indians are dead (a good Indian is a dead Indian) Or riding in motor cars— (the oil lands, you know, they’re all rich) Smoke smarts my eyes, Cottonwood twigs and buffalo dung Smoke grey in the teepee— (or is it myopic trachoma) The prairies are long, The moon rises, Ponies Drag at their pickets. The grass has gone brown in the summer— (or is it
More »