ABSTRACT
The closing decades of the twentieth century have witnessed a double explosion of interest in travel writing. On the one side, bookstores whose travel shelves were once confined to atlases, guidebooks and maps-to nominally ‘factual’ and ‘objective’ accounts-now include sections devoted to personal, avowedly imaginative accounts of travel. The style varies dramatically (even in the same book): from lush and lyrical to comic and picaresque, evoking a nineteenth-century tradition of exploration, enacting the ironic stance of late twentieth-century postmodernism. Many critics agree that the work of Bruce Chatwin, Pico Iyer or Redmond O’Hanlon-to name just three prominent authors-maps not only new landscapes in a still markedly various world but also new spaces within contemporary literature. They have driven travel writing beyond itself-some reviewers claim that they have even re-invented travel writing, giving it both a new popularity and a new critical respectability-by their determination to press new possibilities of finding the terms for-of coming to terms with-other cultures and other natures.
