Every story, they say, is the Iliad or the Odyssey – that is, a departure or a homecoming. Fairy tales often, therefore, tell of quests; stories as different as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Anne Tyler's Accidental Tourist (1985) recount journeys; and the very notion of narrative implies movement from a beginning to an end, mirroring the dynamics of a trip. In short, fiction has always been tied to travel.

The word ‘fiction’ typically refers to literature in the form of prose, stories either long or short that recount ‘imaginary events and people’ (Concise Oxford English Dictionary). More generally it evokes all things invented or untruthful. Thus, a politician's claims may be decried by opponents as ‘pure fiction’ less pejoratively the term might apply to a child's imaginary friend. As Williams reminds us in the original Keywords (2014 [1976]), the Latin fingere, from which the term ‘fiction’ was born, meant ‘to form’ or ‘to contrive’, referring specifically to the fashioning of clay. Not surprisingly, fingere also gave rise to the words ‘feign’ and ‘figment’, terms which underscore the contributions to fiction of both artifice and imagination.

This genealogy introduces a tension among those studying travel writing: some readers exclude imaginary journeys from the genre. For them Gulliver's Travels (1726) or Voltaire's Candide (1759) fail to qualify as travel literature because they are not based on the actual peregrinations of their authors. But the distinction is messy. Michael Kowalewski, Charles Forsdick, Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan have all commented on the indeterminate boundaries of travel writing. The traditional emphasis on lived experience, typically resulting in first-person narratives, aligns the genre more closely with other supposedly ‘non-fiction’ forms such as memoir and autobiography. However, this grounding in personal experience merely displaces the problem. As discussed by Philippe Lejeune (1989) and others, narratives of personal experience often project an aura of authenticity at the same time that they draw on the toolkit of fiction. And although Peter Hulme and Russell McDougal (2007) speak of the scientific inclinations of some travel literature, most readers acknowledge that even documentary-style work follows the principles of narrative. After all, ‘objective’ representations still crop experience like a photograph in order to highlight or dramatize events.