Abstract:
The genre of travelogue may be regarded almost as old as the human civilization. Iain Manley in his survey of the genre (Manley2011) traces the history of travelogue in the world literature from TheEpicof Gilgamesh(13th-7thcenturiesBC), Homer’s Odyssey (8thcentury BC), accounts of ancient travelers,like the Greeks Arrianus and Pausanius(1-2centuries), the Chinese Faxianand Xuanzang (5thand 7thcenturies), to the medieval textsof the venetian Marco Polo (13thcentury) and Arabian traveler Ibn Batutta (14thcentury), Christopher Columbus of Spain (15thcentury), and Fernão Mendes Pinto of Portugal (16thcentury AD).However, the travelogue as a genre of creative writing emerges mostly in the modern period (although remarkable predecessors must definitely be mentioned, like the brilliant Lusiadas by Luis de Camões, a part of which contains a poetic account of Vasco da Gama’s travels). As put byManley, in the old world “the writer did not really exist yet. Men wrote and books were transcribed [...], but the market for words was small. It depended on [...] the church and the king, with their loyal scribers [...]. Gutenberg’s printing press [...] ate away the institutional monopoly on words, but a class of men called writers did not properly emerge until the first copyright laws were passed in the eighteenth century”. It is through no coincidence that literary travelogue gained popularity in the 18thcentury, also known as the Age of Enlightenment. Especiallyconspicuousis the fact that the most acknowledged travelogues of the time were written by suchgiants of the Enlightenment era as Daniel Defoe(A tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain, 1724-7), and even more so –that Defoe developed the genre by writing one of the first fictional travelogues, two-volume adventures of Robinson Crusoe.The list of glorious names could well be continued –among them Charles de Montesquieu (Lettres Persanes -Persian letters, 1721), Laurence Stern(Sentimental journey through France and Italy, 1768), Wolfgang Goethe(Italienische reise-Italian journey, 1786-88, published in 1817). Other renowned authors include Jean-Baptiste de Boyer (Lettres juives-Jewish letters, 1738-42), Charles Dupaty (Lettres sur L’Italie -Letters of Italy, 1788), Xavier DeMaistre(Voyage autour de ma chambre-Voyage around my room, 1794), and some others
