ABSTRACT
Is “travel writing” literature? Anthropology? Autobiography? Journalism? History? Travel writing might be defined most broadly as nonfiction texts about journeys; however, travel studies is also interested in travel as a metaphor, motif, or historical and material condition that shapes the development and impact of traditional literary forms. Its genres vary remarkably, well beyond the guidebooks that would prepare a person for a trip and the travelogues that narrate what happened on that trip. In addition to popular and personal forms, scholars of travel are also interested in categories of documents without singular or identifiable authors, both official (ship’s logs, maps, military reports) and promotional (guidebooks, advertising). As this array might imply, travel writing is the subject of study by historians and literary scholars, and by those in other disciplines who are interested in questions of empire, identity, diaspora, geography, botany, colonial settlement, environmental studies, art history, and tourism, among other topics.
