Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-m9pkr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-13T06:00:17.665Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Travel writing

from PART I - GENRES AND TYPES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2012

David Morley
Affiliation:
Warwick University
Philip Neilsen
Affiliation:
Queensland University of Technology
Get access

Summary

Introduction

This chapter introduces techniques that are used in travel writing to create a strong sense of place and a meaningful, engaging narrative of a journey. I raise and briefly define well-established terms of modern rhetoric – that is, exposition, description, narration – with the aim of showing that a distinctive and enduring feature of travel writing lies in the ways it mixes these modes of writing. For example, Clive James, who has built a brilliant career working across genres (from poetry to novels to reviews and essays), has commented that it was in travel writing that he was able to bring his various skills as a writer together. He was able to do so, I think, because the best travel writing is a combination of forms – as Rory Stewart has pointed out, the staple of travel books today is ‘the blend of reported speech, historical digressions, landscape portraiture, theorizing and … comedy’, what he sees as a kind of patchwork ‘burlesque’. As in theatrical burlesques, travel writing is often an extravaganza of parody and mixed forms, and so comes with a playfulness that offers great freedom to writers.

However, like all blends, the key lies as much in finding a strong unifying element as it does in the choice of the component parts. Towards the end of the chapter, I will suggest that humour and analysis offer the travel writer ways of effectively joining the different styles they use, and of establishing an engaged, humanist attitude to the people and places they encounter, even if the journey has been a difficult one. Finally, you will find writing exercises drawn from the key techniques that I suggest.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×