Travel Writing

The new edition of Travel Writing is an accessible and interdisciplinary guide to this prolific and popular literary genre. Carl Thompson offers a clear and concise overview of the long history of travel writing from the ancient world to the present day.

Considering a wide range of primary sources from Sir Walter Raleigh to Jenny Diski, the extensively updated second edition:

• introduces the genre and outlines key debates within the field, such as gender, sexuality, postcolonial studies, and visual culture;
• explores the genre’s autobiographical dimensions and different approaches for depicting the self;
• surveys a range of canonical and more marginal works, featuring new discussion of refugee and migrant narratives and LGBTQ travel writing;
• includes a new chapter walking readers through the developments in the genre since the first edition, such as online forms, environmentalism and ecocriticism, and travel writing as an increasingly transnational, multicultural genre.

With a comprehensive glossary and further reading, Travel Writing, Second Edition is an ideal primer to the genre for students - bridging the gap between distant times and distant places - as well as offering literary studies scholars an essential overview of current debates in the field.

Carl Thompson is Reader in English Literature at the University of Surrey, UK. His publications include The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination (2007), Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day (2013), and The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing (2016).