To browse Academia. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing brings together specialists from anthropology, history, literature, and cultural studies to offer a broad and vibrant introduction to travel writing in English between and the present. Text Journal of Writing and Writing Programs, Even other people can present as material entities, encapsulating the shock of difference, the flesh and odours of lived reality, the impossibility of possession.
However prepared for a journey by reading, thinking, and research, in the end, for the writer as traveller, it is the act of travel while writing itself which becomes the heuristic enterprise, the experiment which leads to a solution, an understanding or a new question that may never be definitively solved.
This discussion explores the representability of travel writing as material engagement and as a creative endeavour of scholarly inquiry. Travel is an experience of cultural encounters; the account that witnesses and represents that experience is not only a literary text but also a cultural document, involving issues of power, knowledge, and identity.
In sixteenth-century England the popularity of travel accounts, which documented colonial aspirations, quixotic voyages, and mercantile ventures, manifests that the book as an integral part of the voyage has the power to inform and instruct. Narratives by authors such as Sir Walter Ralegh, Robert Dallington, Fynes Moryson, and Thomas Dallam, depended on the pun between travel journeying and travail toil, pain , presenting the adventures and adversities of travelers together with information on geographical areas with their human societies and cultures, linked to questions of nationality, race, and gender.
The written record of the great number of early travels, represented in Richard Hakluyt's and later in Samuel Purchas's collections, attests to the rise of England's colonial and commercial power, as well as to the significance of travel writing in English literary history. Despite the contemporary debate over the purpose of going abroad and representing foreign countries, travel, like translation β a word semantically related to it β functioned as a cross-cultural process challenging the boundaries of both geographical and ideological insularity.
