ABSTRACT
Travel writing is a hybrid genre that borders on, as well as incorporates, elements of various other text types such as novels, autobiographies, reports, legends, diaries, letters, tracts, or essays, and may, therefore, be difficult to distinguish from them. The popularity of travel writing rests on the way it enables readers to engage with cultural, social, and political alterity in a comprehensible manner. The tendency of the genre to affirm and legitimize the values, discourses, and agendas of travelers’ home societies has rendered travel writing a powerful tool of endeavors of colonialism and imperialism, and this potential has crucially informed journey accounts about the Americas. The high degree of narrative subjectivity and stylistic diversity that marks Graham’s and Prieto’s travelogues connects their texts to another type of journey account. Based on the premise that narratives actively contribute to discursive constructions of geographies and civilizations, travel writing has been an important means of communicating knowledge, ideas, and imaginaries of the Americas.
