Vanreyssa González Del ValleTRAVEL 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 THEORY

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 sub-genre, invented in the 19th

century, is the guide book.

TRAVEL LITERATURE

The Americans, Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson and William Least Heat-Moon, 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.

TRAVELOGUES

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.

FICTION

PHOTOS