ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an analysis of human–animal relations in travel writing, demonstrating the new insights that the ‘animal turn’ can offer the study of travel texts, and vice versa. Drawing on a wide range of examples, the chapter focuses particularly on prominent works by Robert Louis Stevenson, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Mark Shand, Robyn Davidson and John Steinbeck. It suggests a typology of the roles that animals have traditionally been allocated in travel writing – as quest-objects, as instruments of travel and as companions – highlighting the ways that these representations constrain and enable human understandings of encounters with other species.
