Travel literature is travel writing aspiring to literary value. Travel literature typically records the experiences of an author touring a place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary. Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or may involve travel to different regions within the same country. Accounts of spaceflight may also be considered travel literature.
Literary travelogues generally exhibit a coherent narrative or aesthetic beyond the logging of dates and events as found in travel journals or a ship's log. Travel literature is closely associated with outdoor literature and the genres often overlap with no definite boundaries. Another sub-genre, invented in the 19th century, is the guide book.
Read more about Travel Literature: History, Travelogues, Fiction, Travel Literature in Criticism
Famous quotes containing the words travel and/or literature:
“The travel writer seeks the world we have lost—the lost valleys of the imagination.”
—Alexander Cockburn (b. 1941)
“A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time—this one, for instance—as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.”
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