ABSTRACT
The modern travel book, I have suggested, features the follow-ing: a narrator/traveler who travels for the sake of travel; a narrative organization that owes much to fiction; a commitment to both a literary language and a personal voice; and thematic concerns of great moral and philosophic import. By the time a young James Boswell set off for his Grand Tour of Europe in 1763, travel books with these elements were just emerging from the wealth of voyage and discovery writing that had preceded them. Although one senses in Columbus's letters and in Ralegh's memoirs a hint of personal voice and deliberate narrative style, it was not until the eighteenth century that this tendency flourished. Boswell's travel books and his Journals did much to establish this highly personal travel writing as a standard fixture in the European canon of nonfiction literature.
