ABSTRACT
With the emergence of modern tourism in the nineteenth century, many travel writers marked their distance from those they disparaged for following the ‘beaten track’, of which the guidebook was a comic symptom. And yet, if the formal organisation and stylistic features of travel books and travel guides seem to be sharply distinct from each other, the rhetoric of practical advice, with its characteristic moods and pronouns, plays an important role in narrative travel writing, not only as an object of parody. This chapter’s discussion of accounts of journeys to Italy by D. H. Lawrence and Edith Wharton, and of Guadeloupe (1988) by Maryse Condé, suggests different ways in which the autobiographical co-exists with a concern to prescribe a certain ‘art of travel’.
