Travel literature

• 1. Introduction

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  Travel literature is one of the oldest forms of human storytelling, and one of the most capacious. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, generally considered a 1st-century CE work, stands as one of the earliest known examples. It described trade routes and coastlines in painstaking detail for sailors who needed that information to survive. What drove its unknown author to write it? The same impulse that drove Petrarch to climb Mont Ventoux in 1336, that sent Ibn Battuta across the known world in the 14th century, and that sends bloggers posting today from airports and mountain passes: the desire to record what it feels like to be somewhere else.

  This is a genre that resists clean definition. Travel literature encompasses guide books and nature writing, slave narratives and social satire, fiction and memoir. Some of it contains fastidious geographic fact. Some of it is frankly embellished. As early as the 2nd century CE, Lucian of Samosata was already complaining about travel writers who added fantastic stories to their accounts. The boundary between what actually happened and what the author wished had happened has always been porous.

  The questions this documentary will try to answer are not merely historical. Why did travel writing become an academic discipline only in the mid-1990s? How did escaped slaves turn forced movement into a literary form? And what does it mean that Gulliver's Travels, one of the most enduring works of 18th-century British fiction, was explicitly designed to parody the genre?

• 2. Ancient and Medieval Roots

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  Pausanias, writing in the 2nd century CE, produced his Description of Greece based on his own direct observations. That word, observations, matters here. Pausanias was not recounting myth or received wisdom. He went and looked, then wrote down what he saw. His approach established a template that travel writers would follow for centuries.

  Across the medieval world, the genre took hold in different forms. Ibn Jubayr, who lived from 1145 to 1214, kept journals of his travels. Ibn Battuta, born in 1304 and living until 1377, ranged even further, recording journeys across the known world in remarkable detail. The travel genre, the source makes clear, was a fairly common genre in medieval Arabic literature. It was not an exotic outlier; it was mainstream.

  In China, a distinct literary tradition developed during the Song dynasty, which ran from 960 to 1279. Fan Chengda, born in 1126 and dying in 1193, packed his writing with geographical and topographical information. Su Shi, the poet and statesman who lived from 1037 to 1101, used a travel account, his Record of Stone Bell Mountain, to advance a philosophical and moral argument. Chinese travel writing of this period appeared in multiple styles: narratives, prose, essays, and diaries. The account Zhou Daguan wrote of Cambodia in the thirteenth century became one of the major sources for understanding the city of Angkor at its height.

• 3. Pleasure and the Personal Journey

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  Petrarch, born in 1304 and dying in 1374, climbed Mont Ventoux in 1336 and wrote that he went simply for the pleasure of seeing the top of the famous height. His account is striking for what he admitted: he went to the mountaintop not for trade, not for religious obligation, not to carry a message, but because he wanted to. The companions who stayed at the bottom he called frigida incuriositas, a cold lack of curiosity. He made allegorical connections between the physical climb and his own moral progress.

  The mid-15th century produced another telling statement of motive. Gilles le Bouvier, in his Livre de la description des pays, wrote that many people delight in seeing the world, while others wish to know without going there. He was writing for both audiences simultaneously: the traveler who wanted a practical guide and the armchair reader who wanted to experience somewhere else through words.

  Antoine de la Sale, born around 1388, climbed to the crater of a volcano in the Lipari Islands in 1407. He described his reasons as councils of mad youth. That phrase stays with you. It captures something the most earnest travel writing often misses: that the impulse to go somewhere strange and difficult is not always rational, and that honesty about that impulse can itself become literature. A poet for the Duke of Burgundy traveled through the Jura Mountains in 1430 and recorded not just the landscape but his horrified reaction to the sheer rock faces and the thundering mountain streams.

• 4. Expansion and Empire

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  By the 16th century, travel accounts had multiplied fast enough that publishers began compiling them into collections. Simon Grynaeus assembled accounts under the title Novus Orbis, meaning New World. Richard Hakluyt made his own collections. Travelers to Persia included the brothers Robert Shirley and Anthony Shirley. Those going to India included Duarte Barbosa, Ralph Fitch, Ludovico di Varthema, Cesare Federici, and Jan Huyghen van Linschoten. The range of names alone signals how international the enterprise had become.

  Humanist travelers in Europe were producing a different kind of account, one that paid particular attention to monuments and inscriptions. Seyfried Rybisch produced his Itinerarium in the 1570s. Michel de Montaigne published his Journal de voyage in 1581, followed by his Voyage d'Italie in 1585. Aernout van Buchel wrote his Iter Italicum between 1587 and 1588. These were not expedition reports. They were records of educated men observing their own continent as if they had just arrived.

  The 18th century saw travel literature become a dominant cultural form in Britain. Almost every famous writer of the period worked in it. Captain James Cook's diaries, published in 1784, sold the way blockbusters sell today. Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, covering his journeys from 1799 to 1804 and first published in French, reached naturalists across Europe in translation. Charles Darwin was among those it influenced.

• 5. Slave Narratives as Travel Writing

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  Frederick Douglass's autobiographical Narrative is deeply intertwined with his travel experiences. The arc of that narrative moves from travel entirely at the command of his masters to travel when and where he wishes. That movement, from forced displacement to chosen movement, is the structure of liberation made literal. Travel writing, in this case, becomes something far more than tourism or adventure.

  As John Cox put it in Traveling South, travel was a necessary prelude to the publication of a narrative by a slave, for slavery could not be simultaneously experienced and written. The act of physical escape preceded the act of literary witness. The genre of slave travel narratives developed during the 18th and 19th centuries, detailing how enslaved people escaped the restrictive laws of the southern United States and the Caribbean.

  Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave is described as a more traditional travel narrative. He overcame the restrictions of law and tradition in the south after being kidnapped and enslaved. Harriet Ann Jacobs, in Incidents, wrote about travel that covered a small distance, escaping one living situation for a slightly better one, before eventually reaching freedom in the north. The genre these writers created revealed something the broader travel literature tradition had usually ignored: that the freedom to travel at all was itself a form of privilege, and that its absence was a form of captivity.

• 6. The Art of Staying Put

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  Lawrence Durrell's Bitter Lemons, published in 1957, belongs to a particular strand of travel writing in which the writer settles into a locality for an extended period. This is travel literature that trades the journey for the arrival, watching a place over time rather than passing through it quickly. Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, published in 1956, covers the years from 1935 to 1939, when he lived as a child with his siblings and widowed mother on the Greek island of Corfu. The book describes the Durrell family's life with humor and explores the island's fauna. It became the first book in what is called the Corfu trilogy.

  Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia, published in 1977, earned wide acclaim. His The Songlines followed in 1987. Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence, published in 1989 and described as a best-seller, launched its own series of sequels. Deborah Tall's The Island of the White Cow: Memories of an Irish Island appeared in 1986.

  Robert Louis Stevenson pushed the genre in a different direction. Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, published in 1879 and set in the Cévennes region of France, is among the first popular books to present hiking and camping as recreational activities rather than hardships. It also tells of Stevenson commissioning one of the first sleeping bags. His An Inland Voyage had appeared a year earlier, in 1878.

• 7. Gender, Scholarship, and the Blog Era

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  Lucie Azema, a French writer, has argued that the majority of travel writing is by men, and that when women have written travel books, those books tend to be forgotten. In her work Les femmes aussi sont du voyage, she described male travel writing as giving an unequal, colonialist, and misogynistic view of the world. Gwen Moffat, a British mountaineer and the first woman certified as a mountain guide, used old diary entries from her mountain travels to write three memoirs: Space Below My Feet in 1961, On My Own Ground in 1964, and Survival Count in 1972. All three documented her struggles with injustices and discrimination in a male-dominated career.

  The systematic study of travel literature as an academic discipline emerged in the mid-1990s, complete with its own conferences, organizations, journals, and anthologies. Key works from just before that moment include Paul Fussell's Abroad from 1980, which read British interwar travel writing as a form of escapism, and Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes from 1992, which examined how Victorian travel writing spread a colonial mindset. Sara Mills's Discourses of Difference looked at how gender and colonialism intersected in 19th-century women's travel writing.

  In the 21st century, travel literature moved onto social media. Travel blogs were among the first instances of blogging, which began in the mid-1990s. Writers like Matthew Kepnes, Johnny Ward, and Drew Binsky built readerships through personal blogs, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Researchers have since developed methodologies such as the Diagnostic Journaling Process Model, designed to help stakeholders identify and promote sustainable tourism practices through travel literature. The genre that began with sailors describing coastlines now shapes how millions of people plan where to go and what to expect when they get there.