ABSTRACT
Historians studying the history of travel swiftly acquire something of the nature of travellers themselves, because they enter a terrain that has still not been well explored or mapped. Much has been written about travel in the past, but until relatively recently this tended to draw on travel literature merely as a source of historical data, rather than reecting on the strategies deployed by travellers as they wrote their accounts. Over the last 30 years, however, more investigative studies have been published by historians, geographers, anthropologists, and literary critics, and several journals have been launched into the history of travel and tourism, which, together with new handbooks and encyclopaedias, have emphasised the importance of travel writing studies as a discipline in its own right.1
