Travelogue

6 Key excerpts on "Travelogue"

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  eBook - ePub

  The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Travel and Tourism

  • Linda L. Lowry(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  During the so-called Golden Age of travel writing (1850–1950, roughly), escapist explorer-adventurers covered the globe in search of the exotic so they could use it in their writing. Art historian Robert Byron ventured to Italy, novelist Evelyn Waugh to the Amazon, journalist Graham Greene headed to Liberia, Bruce Chatwin to Argentina, Peter Mayle to Provence, Eric Newby to Afghanistan, and Wilfred Thesiger to Iraq. The travel books that became popular in the early 20th century were seen to be learned essays with a now-requisite component of exotic narrative. This curiosity often contributed to particularly flowery prose and an over-exoticization of people and places.

  Yet the category of travel writer has never been a homogenous one, nor is it mutually exclusive of other professions. The earliest forms of travel writing were produced by explorers, scientists, and novelists who narrated their travel experiences by augmenting factual description with various opinions and judgments. Popular travel writers of previous centuries primarily held other professions, including that of journalist (e.g., Peter Fleming), archaeologist (e.g., Aurel Stein), diplomat (e.g., Eric Teichman), missionary (e.g., Mildred Cable), and political commentator (e.g., Owen Lattimore). For such figures, travel writing was a product of the places to which their primary vocations happened to take them.

  It must then be said that travel writing, too, is far from a homogenous category. The wide range of terms used to describe the genre includes travel book, travel narrative, travel literature, journeywork, travel memoir, travel story, Travelogue, traveler’s tale, travel journal, travel article, travel account, or, rather simply, travels. These multiple denotations explain not just the genre’s various, mutable forms—travel writing has been linked to memoir, short story, essay and ethnography, and it certainly borrows from tropes of each—but also its literary antecedents. What perhaps makes travel writing distinct is that, unlike the novel, say, the travel book claims literal, literary validity by referring to actuality, derived from the research by the travel writer. And yet, fictional techniques are made ample use of in contemporary travel writing; even works such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

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  Travel Writing

  • Casey Blanton(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  And even the most self-conscious autobiographical tales of travel, like those of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lawrence Durrell, or James Fenton, rely on rather factual descriptions of people and places wholly outside the mind of the traveler. Yet, the distinctions are important. Genuine “travel literature,” as opposed to what has been called “pretravel,” depends upon a certain self-consciousness on the part of the narrator that was not seized upon until after the Renaissance and, in fact, not highly developed until the concern with “sensibility” in the eighteenth century. 4 What we have come to expect today as travel literature contains a balance of these two elements: impersonal and personal. “Successful travel literature,” says Paul Fussell in his anthology about the subject, “mediates between two poles: the individual physical things it describes, on the one hand, and the larger theme that it is ‘about’ on the other” (Fussell 1987, 126). What travel books are “about” is the interplay between observer and observed, between a traveler's own philosophical biases and preconceptions and the tests those ideas and prejudices endure as a result of the journey. The reverberations between observer and observed, between self and world, allow the writer to celebrate the local while contemplating the universal. To catch the spirit of the genre of travel literature, then, is to isolate these later, post-Enlightenment narratives into a recognizable group with certain characteristics. Among the chief characteristics are a narrator/traveler who travels for the sake of travel itself; a narrative style that borrows from fiction in its use of rising and falling action, character, and setting; a conscious commitment to represent the strange and exotic in ways that both familiarize and distance the foreign; a writerly concern with language and literature; and finally, thematic concerns that go beyond descriptions of people and places visited

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  Travel Journalism

  Informing Tourists in the Digital Age

  • Bryan Pirolli(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It remains impossible, however, to identify an exact moment that marks the birth of travel journalism, should one exist, but it was slowly emerging as writers in North America and Europe began fighting for professional recognition. As they were stepping up as journalists, establishing their credibility, new mass audiences were developing as consumers of tourist experiences. Throughout the twentieth century, publications catered to these new audiences, and gradually ‘travel journalism’ established itself as a credible – if not enviable – profession to both the media and tourism marketers. Curiously, much of its critical and consumer-oriented reporting is at direct odds with the news values developed in the early twentieth century, but set apart as a subsection of lifestyle journalism, travel journalism developed its own particular identity in the media industry. Lifestyle journalism, at its heart, ‘focuses on audiences as consumers, providing them with factual information and advice, often in entertaining ways, about goods and services they can use in their daily lives’ (Hanusch, 2012, p. 1). Lifestyle topics include food, fashion, arts, and of course travel, but relatively little academic work has focused attention on this type of journalism as opposed to more civically-oriented journalism. I will explore these contradictions and departures from professional norms throughout this book, but first it’s important to approach a more recent history to comprehend how travel journalism and media have grown with the rise of the internet.

  A shift in perspective, from author to anonymity

  Travel writing and narration, well before journalistic practice developed, exhibited varying and ever-changing perspectives. The author was not always a central figure in the writing, and, as Blanton writes, historically, ‘the narrator’s thoughts and reactions are all but hidden’ (Blanton, 1997, p. 3). She discusses ships’ logs, for example, which may have been more factual than narrative. By the eighteenth century Descartes introduced ideas that opened up conversations about writers’ emotions, which begin to become more prevalent (Blanton, 1997, pp. 11–12). By the nineteenth century the travel narrative had become a literary genre unto itself, according to Bertho-Lavenir, who cites texts by French authors Stendhal, Hugo, Dumas, and Flaubert, writing, ‘We know what the traveler saw and what he felt, if the vantage point was beautiful or if the sun was scorching’ (Bertho-Lavenir, 1999, p. 44). These literary evolutions put into question the role of the author, who was no longer simply describing, but actively participating and expressing reactions along the way. This changing perspective opened up debates in the nineteenth century on the difference between travelers and tourists – a dated debate that still rears its head today in the industry. The idea of a noble traveler and a mundane tourist developed, often related to class and travel style. For example, group travel, popularized by companies like Thomas Cook in the nineteenth century, was considered touristy, while individualized travel, accessible to the wealthier, carried the more illustrious label of travel. Part of being a traveler was the idea of a personal conquest, more than simply visiting a location (Blanton, 1997, p. 107). It was in this context that Bertho-Lavenir explains, ‘The traveler is that which the tourist is not. The traveler is aristocratic, the tourist is plebeian. The traveler discovers, the tourist follows. The traveler lives an intimate and intense experience; the tourist goes in groups and steps in the footsteps of others’ (1999, p. 403).

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  The Diary

  The Epic of Everyday Life

  • Batsheva Ben-Amos, Dan Ben-Amos(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Indiana University Press

    (Publisher)

  9 First, youji in imperial China contains a coherent and indispensable narrative of a journey, written in prose, to a particular place (or places). In some pre-Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) texts in which travel plays a prominent role, the journey is mythical, symbolic, or imaginative. All of the works I identify as travel diaries in this essay, however, concern an extended physical journey to a geographically verifiable place. Unlike Western travel literature, with its focus on distant, “other” alien lands, the overwhelming majority of Chinese youji written before the nineteenth century describe places inside China. Second, Chinese travel literature is written either in essay (that is, a short piece of writing on a particular place) or diary format. Third, youji provide descriptive information on the places, phenomena, and conditions observed by the author during a journey. The content of these reports varies, depending on the geographical focus of the narrative and the author’s personal interests and tastes. For instance, we might find descriptions of famous landmarks; prominent mountains and rivers; social, political, and religious practices and conditions; local customs and products; and even flora and fauna. And finally, authorial observations, comments, and reactions are also present in these reports—and this at once distinguishes youji from geographical and ethnographic accounts. But Chinese travel diarists do not write about their personal feelings while “on the road” (concerns such as missing a loved one or homesickness, however, appear regularly in traditional Chinese poetry). They essentially function as traveling historian-reporters who seek to chronicle their observations in a reliable way for the interested reader and/or future traveler.

  Literary historians usually identify an early ninth-century text titled Diary of Coming South (Lainan lu

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  Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century

  Texts, Images, Objects

  • Kate Hill(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Introduction: Narratives of Travel, Narratives that Travel Kate Hill

  This collection of essays investigates travel as a dynamic mode of experiencing and ordering the world in the nineteenth century, through the ways in which it was narrated across media and genres and across and between spaces, places, cultures, and people. Not only is travel itself a form of movement, but the cultures, narrative forms, subjectivities, and spaces which it brings into contact are themselves fluid, shifting, and continually interacting in complex ways. While this may itself be a constant, the twin forces of modernity and colonialism in the nineteenth century bore on these processes of hybridization in new ways, which are explored within this volume.1 If Mary Baine Campbell can write of the twenty-first century, ‘the old motifs of the journey – home, departure, destination, the liminal space between – have lost their reference in the lived experience of most people who are not tourists’ (Campbell 2002, 263), then, this collection argues, this hyper-mobility and loss of fixed points has its roots in the nineteenth century.2

  Such a confluence of shifting, fluid, and dynamic forces brought into play by travel also created an opposite force – a determination to impose fixity and clear boundaries, to separate ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘us’ and ‘them’. An emphasis on creating fixed and mapped terrains, not only geographical, but cultural and emotional, has been a focus of work on travel writing, as Maria Frawley indicates: ‘For the Victorians, travel was all about the boundaries … that structured their experiences’ (Frawley 2005, 27). As Clifford suggests, ‘stasis and purity are asserted … against

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  Tourism, Travel, and Blogging

  A discursive analysis of online travel narratives

  • Deepti Ruth Azariah(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Lonely Planet website, the tensions between the personal travel and commercial tourism still remain. In blogs on travel-specific web hosts, entries that dissociate travel experiences from touristic ones are framed within advertisements from sponsors and web hosts. These sponsors rely on authors to generate travel-related content that underwrites their own promotion of tourism. Similarly, independent blog authors who use the themes and language of travel to position themselves as adventurous nomads publicise their texts and validate their position as experts on travel through the use of touristic narrative techniques. The relationship is therefore largely determined by the constantly changing narratorial positions of travel bloggers and the interaction they have with others. Moreover, discourses of travel and tourism in these blogs, though dissonant, are not mutually exclusive.

  Travel blogs are often analysed to gain an understanding of how individuals describe destinations. However, most of the travel blog posts in this study, with the exception of Tony Wheeler’s Travels, focused on the experience of travelling rather than the destination to be reached. This is understandable, given that many bloggers position themselves as travellers and associate their experiences with travel rather than tourism. In the case of blogs hosted on TravelBlog, TravelPod, and BootsnAll, which do have a touristic focus on destination, this is usually imposed by the web host or sponsor. Viewing travel blogs as forms of self-presentation and as polyphonic texts enables a better understanding of how individuals and destinations are described in these narratives. It also may help explain why some travel blogs may be inadequate as sources of information on destination image.

  The multimodality and multivocality of travel blogs support the intertwining of forms of discourse associated with both travel and tourism. This in turn complicates the notion of these texts as personal narratives. If for some readers Tony Wheeler’s Travels lacks conviction as a personal narrative and a travel blog, this is due in some part to the links and paratextual elements that display its connection with Lonely Planet or other commercial entities. Likewise, TravelBlog and TravelPod frame personal travel narratives in tourist advertising by virtue of platform structures that include third-party advertising and web-hosted content. Faced with a multiplicity of voices, it is sometimes difficult to interpret these travel blogs as texts that are personal in the sense that they express a blogger’s views and choices alone. Nevertheless, a number of formal features and paratextual elements are integral to presenting the travel blogger. The design of title banners, the displayed links, embedded photographs and their accompanying captions and tags, and hashtags on Twitter

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