ABSTRACT
Travel writing is currently a flourishing and highly popular literary genre. Every year a stream of new travelogues flows from the printing press, whilst travel writers like Michael Palin, Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux regularly feature in the bestseller lists in both Europe and America. The reading public's appetite for the form has also prompted publishers to reissue many old out-of-print travel books in series such as Random House's Vintage Departures and Picador's Travel Classics. As a result, armchair travellers today can indulge their taste for the exotic, or for adventure, or simply for news of the wider world, by drawing on a vast array of both contemporary and historical travel books. These books recount journeys made for almost every conceivable purpose, to well-nigh every destination in the world. Their authors range from pilgrims, conquistadors and explorers to backpackers, minor celebrities and comedians undertaking a madcap jaunt on some inappropriate mode of transport; and they range also from ‘serious’ writers, seeking to make a significant contribution to art or knowledge, to hack writers and dilettantes happy to churn out the most superficial whimsy. Yet if the term ‘travel writing’ encompasses a bewildering diversity of forms, modes and 2itineraries, what is not in question is the popularity of the genre as a whole: recent decades have undoubtedly witnessed a travel writing ‘boom’, and this boom shows no signs of abating in the near future.
