Travel Literature Through the Ages

Literary Genre Summary

• Travel literature includes outdoor literature, guide books, nature writing, and travel memoirs.

• Pausanias was an early travel memoirist in Western literature.

• Lucian of Samosata discussed history and travel writers who added embellished, fantastic stories to their works as early as the 2nd century CE.

• In medieval Arabic literature, the travel genre was a fairly common genre.

• In China, 'travel record literature' became popular during the Song dynasty.

• Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336 is one of the earliest known records of taking pleasure in travel, of travelling for the sake of travel and writing about it.

• In the 18th century, travel literature was commonly known as "books of travels," which mainly consisted of maritime diaries.

• The 20th century's interwar period was described as a heyday of travel literature.

• Travel books come in styles ranging from the documentary to the literary.

• Adventure literature includes outdoor adventure literature.

• A guide book or travel guide is "a book of information about a place, designed for the use of visitors or tourists".

• A travel journal is a record made by a traveller, sometimes in diary form, of the traveler's experiences, written during the course of the journey and later edited for publication.Travel Literature: A Genre of Social Media

• Travel literature details how slaves escaped restrictive laws of southern US and the Caribbean to find freedom

• Frederick Douglass' autobiographical Narrative is a famous slave travel narrative

• Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave is another travel narrative where he overcomes the restrictions of law and tradition in the south to escape after he is kidnapped and enslaved.

• Harriet Ann Jacobs' Incidents is a travel narrative that covers a small distance as she escapes one living situation for a slightly better one and later from slavery to freedom in the north

• Travel blogs are a type of travel literature that emerged in the 21st century, which provides information about adventures and advice for navigating countries or traveling generally

• Notable travel bloggers include Matthew Kepnes, Johnny Ward, and Drew Binsky

• The systematic study of travel literature emerged as a field of scholarly inquiry in the mid-1990s with conferences, organizations, journals, monographs, anthologies, and encyclopedias.

• Prizes awarded annually for travel books include the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature, and the Dolman Best Travel Book Award.

• The Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards began in 1985 and are given by the SATW Foundation, which includes awards for travel books, travel guidebooks, and travel coverage in various formats.

• The National Outdoor Book Awards and Banff Mountain Book Awards also recognize travel literature in the outdoor and adventure areas.

• The North American Travel Journalists Association holds an annual awards competition honoring travel journalism in various categories ranging across print and online media.