ABSTRACT
While travel writing is a non-fiction genre, travellers’ accounts always involve aspects of narrative composition more commonly associated with imaginary fiction. Critical attention to a travel account’s narrative strategies can thus illuminate the ways in which generic conventions of storytelling and more subtle strategies of narrative composition give verbal shape to a traveller’s experience. In so doing, narrative analysis highlights the constructed, if not fictional, dimensions of the textual artefact and provides the means to query the reliability of travellers’ representations and their connection to broader narrative aspects of discursive order, including politics and history.
