What Makes Travel Literature?

Abstract

This article identifies and describes several characteristics of travel literature as a genre. The article starts with a diachronic survey writing to establish when and how travel literature was born and continues with a synchronic description to identify present features and future perspectives of the genre. Posing that a persistent characteristic of travel literature is the textualised authorial presence, the article traces the progress from a rhetoric of objectivity to a rhetoric of subjectivity and the correlation of the outer and inner journey as means of achieving a specific reading pact of authenticity and concludes on the centrality of the travel author.