Introduction: Travelling Pleasure — Reading Pleasure

Abstract

People have travelled since time immemorial and for many reasons; accounts of travel — or travelogues¹ — have thus been produced in various cultural contexts.² The present book is intended to provide an introduction to English travel writing, with its main forms and traditions. Even though the travelogue is a genre not easily demarcated, a basic understanding of its characteristic features has evolved over the centuries: accounts of travel depict a journey in its course of events and thus constitute narrative texts (usually composed in prose). They claim — and their readers believe — that the journey recorded actually took place, and that it is presented by the traveller him or herself. Within this basic frame of definition, accounts of travel manifest themselves in a broad formal spectrum, giving expression to a great variety of travel experience.

The literature of travel is gigantic; it has a thousand forms and faces.

(Percy G. Adams, 1983, p. 281)