ABSTRACT
The history of travel literature is not so much the history of how men and women actually perceived and experienced the Other, that is the foreign world they encountered on their travels, but rather the history of what kinds of constructions they presented of it in their texts. To a large extent this is not a matter of individual choice. The constructions presented appear to be historically preconditioned by the prevailing cultural concepts of a general, social and natural, order and the individual’s place in it. These concepts may be discovered in the approach to the unfamiliar as expressed in the methods and patterns used by travel writers in selecting and shaping their material.
