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Travel - A Literary History

Description

No previous generation has ever travelled so energetically or so obsessively as ours, nor has travel writing ever been so much in fashion as it is now. But behind the self-conscious literary artistry of today's narratives there lies a rich and fascinating history of travel writing, stretching back over several thousand years.

Travel writing has emerged from migration, war, exploration, trade, conquest, pilgrimage, science, and poetic longing.  But when they recorded their travels, the military commanders of Greece and Rome, the navigators of the Age of Discovery, the diplomats and missionaries of the seventeenth century, the dilettantes who set out on the Grand Tour, the romantic travellers and the scientists of the nineteenth century all had one thing in common: they were re-imagining the world, re-interpreting it in their own minds and for their readers.

This is the first general survey of the entire history of travel literature, with illustrations reproduced from manuscripts and books in the Bodleian Library's collections. It highlights over a hundred texts - from Marco Polo to T.E.Lawrence, from Colombus to Conrad, and James - showing how one motive for travelling has been succeeded by another, and how travel writing has often inhabited a strange borderland between truth and imagination, fact and fiction. It demonstrates how travel writers have slowly outgrown their traditional stance of superiority to all things `foreign', and have moved towards a deeper sensitivity to other lands and other cultures.

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