Metadata of the chapter that will be visualized online Chapter Title
Travel literature
Copyright Year
2014
Copyright Holder
Springer International Publishing Switzerland
Corresponding Author
Family Name
Korstanje
Particle Given Name Given Name
Maximiliano E.
Suffix Division/Department Organization/University
Department of Economics University of Palermo
Street City Postcode
Larrea 1079 Buenos Aires 1414
Country Phone Email
Argentina 48556754
[email protected]
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Travel literature Maximiliano E. Korstanje Department of Economics, University of Palermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Travel literature surfaced between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the intent of documenting the hopes, experiences, and feeling of travelers while away from home. Today it ranges from guidebooks encouraging readers to visit ▶ tourist places, to bestseller novels. Mary Louis Pratt contends that ▶ travel writing resulted from the first studies of Carl Linneo to classify all herbaceous species of the world in an encyclopedia. The needs of classifying imposed by the European science wake up the desire to enlarge the geographies in other continents. Travel literature accompanied the presence of colonial powers portraying the others and recreating imagined landscapes (Pratt 2007). Originally employed by colonial governors to understand the customs, expectances, and tactics of resistance to expand their control on aboriginal tribes, travel literature recovered the importance to “being there” to perform fieldworks of social scientists (Korstanje 2012). Travels generate cross-cultural encounters, which determined the interests for others. The key factor for triggering this genre was the curiosity for other lands, brought by Enlightenment and Romanticism. Anthropologically speaking, “travel writing” # Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014 J. Jafari, H. Xiao (eds.), Encyclopedia of Tourism, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01669-6_595-1
refers to an ongoing discovery of what is hidden (Mansfield 2008). In perspective, Voigt (2009) reconsiders the fact that these customs stemmed from an older literature genre known as “captivity-writings” more than four centuries before the conquest of America. To be exact, these narratives flourished in the war against Muslims in ▶ Spain through 12th ADs. As a mediator between two contrasting cultures, captives recorded their memories to describe the aboriginal societies. The Latinist, Nicolas Gerlomini argues that one of the oldest testimonies of travel literature was the “Gallic Wars,” authored by Caius Julius Caesar. Roman generals were accustomed to writing down all their experiences, problems, and obstacles during the battlefields in the form of compiled text, testimonii. These chronicles were served by other generals to trace a map of uncivilized lands (Gerlomini 2004). As noted, travel writing has been expanding worldwide in recent years, configuring a new genre not only in literature and science but also in tourism. The cultural industries in modern societies are based on the chronicles of journeys. It is a common belief that “travel literature” sets the pace to “travelogue,” resulting from the digital revolution. Because it provides a much deeper qualitative view to expand the understanding of how landscapes are constructed in the mind, travel literature poses a fertile ground for ▶ future tourism-related research. For example, organic ▶ destination images could be fruitfully
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studied by using existent methodologies in combination with travel writing. See Also ▶ Aboriginal tourism, ▶ adventure tourism, ▶ colonialism, ▶ culture shock, ▶ history.
References Gerlomini, N. 2004 “Introduccio´n: Roma hasta la e´poca de Ce´sar”. In Comentarios sobre la guerra en las
Travel literature Galias, Caesar, Julio Cayo [The Gallic Wars by Julius Caesar]. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada. Korstanje, M. 2012 Reconsidering Cultural Tourism: An Anthropologist’s Perspective. Journal of Heritage Tourism 7(2):179-184. Mansfield, C. 2008 Traversing Paris. Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag. Pratt, M. 2007 Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. Voigt, L. 2009 Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds. Durham: University of North Carolina Press.
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