Connectin between History and Travel Writing?

Dear Asma, Thanks for your recommendation. Never knew this text. Let's see how the author broaches the questions about how historians use travel writing.

Indeed, the only travel modern writers about historical issues I know are non-professionals. Most known are maybe all the authors who tried to reconstruct the travels of Odysseus in the Mediterranean sea. A very modern author is Mark Adams, a New York Times bestselling author, who wrote about Machu Picchu and the search / non-search for Plato's Atlantis. -- Concerning theory: I am pretty sure that the literature about Herodotus contains a lot about travel writing, because Herodotus was a traveller. I remember well the problem of the "dragoman", i.e. the un-truthful tourist guide, well-discussed in Herodotus literature. Also Pausanias can be read as a travel guide, and the respective literature will contain thoughts about the issue. The same is true for all the periplous literature, i.e. reports of travels. See e.g. the Web link. Do not forget the travel guides to the underworld, Egyptian book of the Dead, or Pythagorean-Orphic gold tablets with travel instructions for the dead. I remind the Egyptian Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor: The literature about it will discuss travelling, too.

Wonderful, thanks, Thorwald. Herodotus was indeed a man of many talents: a historian, traveller, geographer, writer, etc. Your word 'dragoman' - untruthful traveller - intrigues me. Because it seems to imply that travel has to pursue truth, but many would confirm stereotypes than to accept the realities they see. Travel guides and travel writing can manufacture and circulate such stereotypes, too.

There are many many historians who deal with travel writing.

In terms of theorising the relationship between travel narratives as historical documents or evidence and the production of historical knowledge, I think the problem you are encountering is to do with the tendency towards nation-based histories or regionally-defined historical research in this area, so you may not find a single theoretical critique of the historiography and history of travel writing that takes the whole world as its subject. But a great many of the historians who work on this topic do engage both explicitly and implicitly with these questions, so if you extend your search beyond your particular region and period of interest (although I believe there is quite nuanced work about battlefield tourism available, including analysing different forms of travel narrative - letters, diaries, published accounts - as sources) you may have some luck.

Even by extending your reading into other works by some of the contributors to the collection you already mentioned (e.g. J-P Rubiés) you should find some further engagement with this topic.

There is also a natural alignment between methodological and theoretical discussions from historians of a range of forms of life writing/autobiographical writing more broadly and the critical interests of historians of travel writing, so looking into these debates may also serve you well.

Dear Jane,

Thank you ver much for your perceptive response.

Venturing out of the disciplinary and regional boundaries is a great idea. I've often found myself thinking that travel writing tells more about the travel writers and the places they call home. I wonder to what extent do travel writers exercise self-reflexivity vis-a-vis the destinations and their own home societies, and what the modalities of joys, anxieties and silences can tell us about the minds of the travel-writers and the times in which they travelled.

Ryota

These are some of the questions that provoke our interest in travel writing and other forms of life writing in the first place, are they not? And for me, the potential for critical reflection (or, most the time, total lack thereof) is one of the most interesting features of travel writing in relating it to histories of power.

Hi Jane, I like the line of your thoughts. Have you read Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing by Debbie Lisle? I'm sure you'll get a lot out of it.

Yes, I do admire that book, it echoes many aspects of my own thinking.