Travel literature is travel writing aspiring to 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 subgenre, invented in the 19th century, is the guide book. Early examples of travel literature include Pausanias' Description of Greece in the 2nd century CE, and the travelogues of Ibn Jubayr (11451214) and Ibn Batutta (13041377), both of whom recorded their travels across the known world in detail. The travel genre was a fairly common genre in medieval Arabic literature.[1] 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 (13041374) ascent of Mount 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. Michault Taillevent, a poet for the Duke of Burgundy, travelled through the Jura Mountains in 1430 and left us with his personal reflections, his horrified reaction to the sheer rock faces, and the terrifying thunderous cascades of mountain streams.Antoine de la Sale (c. 1388c. 1462), 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: Because many people of diverse nations and countries delight and take pleasure, as I have done in times past, in seeing the world and things therein, and also because many wish to know without going there, and others wish to see, go, and travel, I have begun this little book. In 1589, Richard Hakluyt (c. 15521616) published Voyages, a foundational text of the travel literature genre. 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). Travel literature also became popular during the Song Dynasty (9601279) of medieval China.[2] The genre was called 'travel record literature' (youji wenxue), and was often written in narrative, prose, essay and diary style.[3] Travel literature authors such as Fan Chengda (11261193) and Xu Xiake (15871641) 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 (10371101) presented a philosophical and moral argument as its central purpose.[4]

In the 18th century, travel literature was commonly known as the book of travels, which mainly consisted of maritime diaries.[5] In 18th century Britain, almost every famous writer worked in the travel literature form

Travelogues
Burton Holmes was an American traveler, photographer and filmmaker, who coined the term "travelogue". Travel stories, slide shows, and motion pictures were all in existence before Holmes began his career, as was the profession of travel lecturer; but Holmes was the first person to put all of these elements together into documentary travel lectures. 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. 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.

Fiction
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. Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and The Dharma Bums (1958) are fictionalized accounts of his travels across the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s. 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

Travel literature in criticism

The systematic study of travel literature emerged as a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry in the mid-1990s, with its own conferences, organizations, journals, monographs, anthologies, and encyclopedias. Among the most important, pre-1995 monographs are: Abroad (1980) by Paul Fussell, 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 Womens 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 writings dissemination of a colonial mind-set; and Belated Travelers (1994), an analysis of colonial anxiety by Ali Behdad. 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).[10] 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. 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). Tim Youngs is a driving force behind the growth of the field, notably through the journal Studies in Travel Writing, through his two co-edited volumes of essays on travel writing, Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (2002), co-edited with T. Hulme, and Perspectives in Travel Writing (2004), co-edited with G. Hooper. Levi-Strauss, in his classic work, Tristes Tropique, laments the disappearance of adventurous travel, and with it invigorating travel writing, as a consequence of the impact of modernization, industrialization, globalization. Indeed, this sentiment is consonant with the theme of loss that activates the book. However, despite Levi-Strauss pessimism, travel writing far from being marginalized, has emerged with a renewed vigour and intensity. A plurality of factors has contributed to this enthusiasm. First, globalization and its impact has become an attractive theme for travel writers. Second, the rise of post-colonial theory and post-colonial studies, along with the re-imagining of

cultural encounters that it has promoted, have given a new impetus to the investigation of travel literature in relation to questions of power. An important facet of travel writing is the complex ways in which narrative and discursive authority is acquired by the writers. This aspect opens up an interesting window into the textual economies and rhetorical strategies fuelling travel literature. The concept of narrative authority in travel literature occupies a contested theoretical space. It is many-sided and raises issues of great complexity related to textuality, representation, sign, desire, power, cultural intervention and modes of sense-making.. These are some of the questions that one has to keep in mind as one moves forward into the analysis of narrative authority in travel writing. Admittedly, some of them are highly abstract and exceedingly complex. The very term post-colonial writing compels to compare this body of writing with the corpus of colonial travel writing which preceded it, and against which it is presumed to react in different ways. Colonial travel literatures were inextricably linked with Orientalism as Edward Said defined it. Said remarked that, everyone who writes about the orient must locate himself vis-a-vis the orient. Clearly, colonial writers located themselves in a space suffused with superiority. It is evident that colonial travel writing operates firmly within the discursive matrix of Orientalism. As commentators like Homi Bhabha have pointed out, the relationship between the Western narrator and his Other is characterized by a deep ambivalence the Other is both an object of attraction and repulsion at the same time resulting in the simultaneous generation of narcissism and paranoia. What we find in colonial travel literature is a narrative authority acquired and established through the juxtaposition of a set of binaries superior culture/ inferior culture, modernity/primitivism, enlightenment/darkness, scientific world view/ superstition. Post-colonial travel writings seek to unsettle these binaries. We must, of curse, be on our guard against seeking to establish a simple contrast between colonial and post-colonial writing. Colonial travel is not monolithic any more than post-colonial travel writing is. There are obvious discrepancies within colonial travel writing as well. For example, Flaubert is generally regarded as a travel writer of distinction. However, critics have pointed out that that his texts have become a site of an ideological split. On the one hand, there is a desire to transcend the power relations of Orientalism through non-participation; on the other, the textual display of its impossibility. Post-colonial travel writing extends, expands, subverts and repudiates colonial travel writing, the travel writings of Amitav Ghosh who enjoys a wide reputation as a novelist of the first importance. His books such as In an Antique Land and Dancing in Cambodia,This book represents the confluence of travel, archival investigation, anthropology and fictional recreation. The author has a remarkable ability to lead the reader forward with an irresistible narrative flow. In this work, he discusses his field work in the Nile delta; in doing so, he comes across a historically significant connection between the Mediterranean, Middle East and India. This historical investigation combined with the authors travels from India to Egypt both Third World countries with a long history. In the Cairo archives, Ghosh uncovers a narrative of an Indian traveller to Aden; he is a business employee of a Jewish merchant living in Mangalore, India. As the author explores the developments of the twentieth century, he also succeeds in bringing out vividly the close contact that existed among Arabs, Jews, and Indians through instrumentalities of trade and travel. In this book, the way history and anthropology buttress the travel narrative constitutes its defining feature.

Our focus here is on the ways in which travel writers purchase a sense of narrative authority. There are three important ways, to my mind, through which the writer has acquired narrative authority. The first is through the encircling of cultural commonalities and shared social experiences of the observer and observed. Unlike in the colonial travel writing, where the observer defiantly occupies a privileged space, in this text no such asymmetrical relationship exists. The second way in which Amitav Ghosh succeeds in securing narrative authority is through the purposive display of his sympathetic understanding of the language, the history, the culture and social structure of Egypt. Unlike colonial travel writers, and some post colonial writers as well, who possess little or no understanding of, and even less admiration for, the cultures they are writing about, Ghosh intimates to us his profound comprehension of the culture that he is dealing with. Third, some of the rhetorical strategies and representational devices that Ghosh deploys enable him to invest his narrative voice with a greater sense of intimacy, cordiality, and authority. . As we sharpen our analytical interest in post-colonial writing, travel literature produced by postcolonial writers should stir our imaginations and promote close study. A number of Indian-born or Indian-linked writers such as V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Pico Iyer have authored travel narratives that are compellingly readable and offer useful points of contrast with colonial travel literatures.