Travel Writing (in the Atlantic World)

by

Astrid Haas

• LAST MODIFIED: 24 July 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0411

Introduction

Travel writing has been known since antiquity in parts of the Atlantic world. It is a hybrid genre that frequently incorporates elements of, and thereby blurs distinctions between, fictional and factual modes of narration, such as expedition reports, diaries, memoirs, or novels. Despite its frequent claims to truth and objectivity, travel writing is subjective, culturally mediated, and tends to affirm the views travelers share with their target audiences. Thus as a powerful tool of knowledge production and public debate, travel writing has played a prominent role in the history of political and cultural encounters across the circum-Atlantic. Atlantic travel writing reveals the societal inequalities that have governed access to mobility, literacy, and public discourses. It voices distinct reasons for traveling and writing, such as scientific inquiry, religious mission, diplomatic deployment, or intellectual exchange. Time and again, it has also been implicated in endeavors of conquest and colonization and their attendant exploitation of natural resources and human labor. While historians have always taken a more comprehensive look at the diverse purposes and narrative modes of the genre, literary scholars until the late twentieth century tended to focus on the smaller body of work penned by travelogue writers and intellectuals with a “literary purpose.” In a similar vein, academic research on travel writing in the Atlantic World tends to privilege the narratives of Western Europeans, especially the British and North American travelers over those hailing from other countries and regions. This has created an imbalance of cultural perceptions and representations among the regions surrounding the Atlantic that requires a rethinking of academic discourses and practices. This bibliography provides a step in this direction, as it focuses, wherever possible, on travelers’ reciprocal itineraries and cultural exchanges across the regions within and surrounding the Atlantic. It defines travel writing as the written accounts of actual journeys told by people who undertook them. The bibliography is limited, though, to covering only intercontinental travel writing across the Atlantic World—that is, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas, since the early modern era. It thus excludes not only narratives about adjacent regions such as Israel/Palestine and the Middle East, but also older accounts as well as works focusing exclusively on journeys within a single region. Moreover, for reasons of limited space, this bibliography does not specifically address works of travel writing resulting from enforced journeys, such as captivity narratives, slave narratives, and refugees’ accounts, some of which are discussed in other bibliographies in the series.

General Overviews

This section assembles works of scholarship that provide readers with general histories of travel writing and key issues in travel writing research. One line of inquiry studies traveling as a culturally mediated practice and/or discusses strategies of narrative representation in works of travel writing, as in Ette 2003, Nünning 2008, and Guyot 2012. Speake 2003, Youngs and Forsdick 2010, and Pettinger and Youngs 2021 exemplify systematic overviews of diverse types of travel writing, while Thompson 2016 and Das and Youngs 2019 are global histories that include historically underrepresented travelers from countries outside of Western Europe and North America. A third focus in recent research is the entanglement of travel and travel writing with practices and discourses justifying asymmetrical power relations such as racism, colonialism, ableism, and gender inequality, as shown in Pratt 2008, Youngs and Forsdick 2010, and Kuehn and Smethurst 2015.

• Das, Nandini, and Tim Youngs, eds. The Cambridge History of Travel Writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

  Currently the most comprehensive overview of studies on travel writing, its history, and prevalent text types. While the section dedicated to different periods focuses on Western European, specifically British, journey accounts, the section on global travel writing covers narratives from and to other parts of Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia.

• Ette, Ottmar. Literature on the Move. Translated by Katharina Vester. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003.

  DOI: 10.1163/9789004484290

  First published as Literatur in Bewegung: Raum und Dynamik grenzüberschreitenden Reisens in Europa und Amerika (Weilerswist, Germany: Velbrück, 2001). Ette engages with major aspects of travel and travel writing since the eighteenth century. Drawing on European, Caribbean, and Latin American examples, this book’s topics range from types of itineraries and textual representations of time, space, nature, and social interactions to major conventions of factual and fictional travel literature.

• Guyot, Alain. Analogie et récit de voyage: Voir, mésurer, interpréter le monde. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012.

  Examines the role of comparisons in the communication of travelers’ knowledge, views, and experiences to their readers. Guyot shows how changing practices of such comparisons in French 18th- and 19th-century journey narratives (including Atlantic ones) not only pursued extratextual agendas but also turned travel writing into a more “literary” endeavor.

• Kuehn, Julia, and Paul Smethurst, eds. New Directions in Travel Writing Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

  Based largely on case studies of British texts, the volume organizes its material by thematic approaches like textuality, topology, or mobility. Several chapters address seldom-discussed topics in travel writing studies, such as writing and editing processes, disability, travel infrastructure, or Afropolitan travel.

• Nünning, Ansgar. “Zur Präfiguration / Prämediation der Wirklichkeitsdarstellung im Reisebericht: Grundzüge einer narratologischen Theorie, Typologie und Poetik der Reiseliteratur.” In Points of Arrival: Travels in Time, Space, and Self/Zielpunkte: Unterwegs in Zeit, Raum und Selbst. Edited by Marion Gymnich, Ansgar Nünning, Vera Nünning, and Elisabeth Waghäll Nivre, 11–32. Tübingen, Germany: Francke, 2008.

  Explores the impact of cultural and literary influences on travel practices and travel writing. Nünning develops a narratological communication model of travel writing and charts a typology of the genre based on different degrees of narrative realism, referentiality, reflexivity, and fictionality.

• Pettinger, Alasdair, and Tim Youngs, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2021.

  Offers studies on distinct types of travelers and travel writing. The volume further addresses topics such as the roles of sensual experiences, language(s), and editorship in travel writing.

• Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 2008.

  A seminal study that explores diverse types of European and North American travel writing about Africa and Latin America since the eighteenth century. Pratt focuses on their entanglement with discourses and practices of colonialism, while the last chapter addresses the “reverse gaze” of postcolonial travel writing.

• Speake, Jennifer, ed. Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia. 3 vols. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003.

  Provides useful introductions to distinct types of travel writing, as well as to journey accounts about individual countries or world regions. Focusing almost exclusively on European and North American travelers, the volume repeatedly conveys the impression that other populations did not write travelogues.

• Thompson, Carl, ed. The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing. London: Routledge, 2016.

  Gives a broad overview of the history of travel writing across different world regions as well as addressing distinct types of travelers and travel texts, journey destinations, and critical approaches to travel writing such as ethics, gender, and race.

• Youngs, Tim, and Charles Forsdick, eds. Travel Writing. Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. 4 vols. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2010.

  Reprints seminal research articles by travel writers and scholars, which address the writing, publishing, and translation of travel writing; its times and places; and different modes of travel and types of travelers, as well as critical approaches to travel writing.