travel writing genre essay

Thus, I would hold with Paul John Eakin when he affirms that definitions of autobiography have never proved to be definitive, but they are instructive, reflecting characteristic assumptions about what may well be the slipperiest of literary genres’ (Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories, 1f.). In some of his writings we can notice that he is discerningly identical with the protagonist, inextricably portraying private and/or public events of his family life. He compares travel writers to those explorers who "have all learnt their knowledge eyes to travel and to capture the soul of other countries." Either way, to begin any journey or, indeed, simply to set foot beyond one’s own front door, is quickly to encounter difference and otherness. clear, but I was right in the middle of the bright and ethnic 'Prague A prevalent feeling of dissatisfaction, alienation, and restlessness which characterized the Victorian Age saw an exodus of a large number of intellectuals to exotic locations. Fielding’s picaresque novels – Joseph Andrews (1742), The Life of Jonathan Wilde the Great (1743) and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) – all inspired by their Spanish predecessor Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), are all based on travel adventures. To cite Lin Sutherland, the emphasis is on the meaning of the author’s "personal travel experience." If we were to consider a chronological approach to autobiography as a genre, we may travel as early as the late 1790s, when Taylor d’Israeli decided to use this new term as a substitute for "self-biography". It is distinguished from an autobiography and memoir by being partially fiction, in which names, locations are changed and events are dramatically and thematically rewritten with close resemblance to that of the subject’s personal experiences. Travel writing provides global context and depth that is difficult to access through the internet, lending, fiction is a genre which has been making it to the bestseller lists for quite some time. An autobiographical novel is based on the subject’s life and personal experiences. (Outlook 48, Mar 31, 2008). When biography, autobiography, or memoir is written about a famous person, then it becomes best-selling because it would not be interesting to read common persons’ lives. French‘s biography on Naipaul, a living subject, is termed ‘authorized biography’ and it reveals the controversial personality of Naipaul. His travel writing exhibits various aspects in the light of history, ethnography, sociology, aggression, concern for weak, sympathy for sufferers and his grand evaluation of men, manners, objects and development of a country. In eighteenth century Britain, every well known author worked in the travel writing structure. Thus, Gudmundsdóttir agrees that autobiography may deal with both contemporary concerns – such as the status of the subject, or issues of gender – and with the close relationship between the individual and his/her past (Gudmundsdóttir, 1). Travel writing provides global context and depth that is difficult to access through the internet, lending, Travel Writing For instance, many conditions under literature such as a format, style of writing, and length makes a typical writing as a genre. (See Fig. Cultural studies may be easily be subjected to an interdisciplinary analysis due to its tendency to free itself from the specialized vocabulary that is evident in many of the "isms" of critical theory. In his book on Renaissance travels and discoveries, Boies Penrose thinks that the mentality of explorers of all ages has been informed by "the magnetism of the myth," and that these epics "lured men to their fate in sandy deserts and tropical jungles." "autobiography may let the reader draw his or her own conclusions about the author acted a certain way through the background and related information given in the book, doing the same in a memoir will be difficult for the reader as the book is a set of independent recollections" (www.differencebetween.net). This article ‘William Darlymple: A Travel Writer’ is divided into six parts including Introduction and conclusion. ` In Kindred, Octavia Butler combines elements of science fiction and historical fiction to create a new genre. The presence of the traveller-narrator supplants the maps and shiny pictures. I could hear people talking in lots of different languages. I do it even now. According to Philippe Lejeune, an autobiography is "a retrospective narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his personality." Along these lines, it can be easily misunderstood that travel writing do not have any uniqueness. I’ve never served a cause. It is not a guidebook, trip diary or marketing piece for the Sunday paper. The Mystic Masseur is based upon an Indian masseur who became a famous Trinidadian politician. (Sutherland, 2002), Writing about pilgrimages during the early Middle Ages, Claude Jenkins reached the conclusion that there is a close relationship between travel writing and "the instinct for travel" which he sees as "innate in some natures in all ages, perhaps in far more than we often realize." I was wrong. What is interesting about French’s ‘authorized’ biography is that it is three-levelled: the first level covers the writer’s childhood in Trinidad, his education at the Queen’s Royal College and Oxford, and his apprenticeship at the BBC, supported by his strong ambition to become a successful writer; the second level is his mature, though unhappy relationship with Patricia Hale; finally, the biography deals with his journeys and travel writing, his personal experiences in Trinidad, England, and the other countries in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean. The genre of travel literature encompasses outdoor literature, guide books, nature writing, and travel memoirs. English literary history records the first use of the term autobiography in William Taylor’s review of Isaac D’Israeli’s Miscellanies published in the Monthly Review as early as 1797. is the discovery of his subject. French’s biography is objective and more reliable as it presents all significant events in Naipaul’s life. The narrator of Naipaul‘s first novel The Mystic Masseur reminds us of the boy narrator of Miguel Street, adopting the posture of a ‘biographer or mock-biographer’. They do not represent a justification by their own form, but by the events they describe and comment upon. Vidyadhar Suraj Prasad Naipaul, Travel literature plays a significant role in literature in the present scenario. One year later, John Pilling stated that such a term as ‘autobiography’ is liberal when it is applied to different instances of personal writing which disclose facts and details of the autobiographer’s personal existence: "There is also another shadowy area obtaining between autobiography (however defined) and the novel which is known, for one reason or another, to take its life from the facts of its author’s life. Naipaul’s writing is self-referential, in the sense that he is aware of the private sources of his imagination and his reading of history to reveal them in a mixed autobiography with facts and fiction. Moreover, they have been written by artists or non-artistic personalities who use the word, the sound, and their art to justify themselves in front of their contemporaries and even posterity. (Winslow, 3), Authorizing a person to write your own biography implies your giving full credentials to that particular biographer, access to each and every aspect of one’s private life, to say nothing about the sometimes almost insurmountable amount of information available: Patrick French mentioned his access to Naipaul’s full archive, which provided him the chance to work on "the last literary biography to be written from a complete paper archive." A possible explanation for this change of attitude is to be found in a different orientation of postcolonial critique, questioning the changes brought about by the colonized expatriates’ return to the UK. (Thompson, 9, emphasis in the original), The key words are journey – a movement in space which can lead to discovery –, alterity, identity, difference, similarity, while the connective and points to the dual nature, or complexity of the discovery to follow the journey. one earphone piece in my right ear, listening to music, I tried to The significance of such travelogues – as those written by Edward W. Lane (Orientalist, translator and lexicographer, the translator of One Thousand and One Nights, 1840), Richard F. Burton (geographer, explorer and translator, known for the pilgrimage to Mecca, recorded in his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al Madinah and Mecca, 1855-6), or Alexander W. Kinglake (Eothen; or Traces of travel brought home from the East, 1844) – resides both in their artistry and for sparking up the imagination of their fellow writers. But, drawing a distinction between fact and fiction is not an easy task. The creation of Google Earth has made the foreign ever more familiar by making the foreign accessible to anyone with access to a computer or internet cafe. Travel Writing As A Literary Genre English Literature Essay *****. I gasped as I stood amidst a flurry of foreign buildings, I am infinitely delighted in mixing with these several ministers of commerce, as they are distinguished by their different walks and different languages. It is given an equal status with: romance, action adventure, fantasy, mystery, detective fiction, and the list might continue. On the other hand, in semi-autobiographical novel the protagonist’s life and timeline are not quite identical with true events. door opened and I stepped outside, still dragging my immensely heavy Surprising is the students’ including of a different category which they call creative non-fiction, followed by the following explanation: "According to Columbia College Chicago, creative non-fiction ‘...comes in many forms: memoir, narrative journalism, travel writing, personal essay, descriptive storytelling... What they all have in common is a basis in reality from careful observation to honest emotional truth.’" [1]. And what I say tends to be interesting. Carl Thompson, in his Travel Writing (2011), suggests that, "To travel is to make a journey, a movement through space. Slowly, the article penetrates into the subject, nonfiction is vast and diverse, spanning from the earliest known civilization to the present. He certainly makes his own selection and exercises his choice with personal inference, which he makes selection in his autobiographical material, which is not presented directly in the first person. In front of me was Asian group talking, with their ever shrinking cameras hanging, The man kept on asking similar kind of questions to my parents and then ten minutes later, they were free to go. suitcase! Courtship-Romance, as classic American stories. The viridescence of the trees and the magnificent landscape. I have trusted to intuition. In your narratives, histories, travel tales, and explorations your consciousness was represented as the principal authority, an active point of energy that made sense not just of colonizing activities but of exotic geographies and peoples." Such a joint venture is supported by Stuart Hall who favours an all-including definition of cultural studies which he views as a mediator between "experience as a lived process" and "a textualized critique". life of its streets, the other, ordered life of my colonial English school, which is called Queen’s Royal College, and then Oxford, London and the freelances’ room at the BBC. Or of saying anything that might perhaps contradict, challenge, or otherwise disrupt the prevailing discourse. Naipaul comments on his writing process as: "The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. Examples of these classic stories are The Grapes of Wrath, The Red Pony, and Of Mice and Men. It is not a surprise that the American students do not mention Naipaul, both definitions may be said to contain elements which also apply to Naipaul’s travel writing. (Turner, 261). I feel something touching my arm and I suddenly wake up, I don’t know how long I had been lying on the beach for. . I can’t lie. Writing about autobiography, anthropology and the postmodern condition, anthropologist Michael, M. J. Fischer discusses what he calls "the three deep attractions of anthropology." [16] Actually, Lejeune did not provide a clear-cut distinction between the literary species of autobiography, the "retrospective prose narrative" which a person writes about his life and "the development of his personality" and the autobiographical novel. Naipaul’s multifaceted and so often controversial writings have more than once placed him in a personal, particular relationship to London, the centre of the British colonial Empire. If "autobiography is written by the source subject about oneself to depict their semireal life or a historical event in a narrative form," its purpose being "to reveal the author‘s experiences or to justify facts or events to the public," (Qasim, 2011), Naipaul’s recording of his life and various experiences covers the most unexpected settings: not only his native Trinidad and Tobago, and neighbouring Jamaica and Venezula, but also India, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia, England, Congo, Ivory Coast, not to mention the USA and South America. By contrast, memoirs focus on the subject’s self-written account of random phases, feelings, and events, which have a great impact on his/her life, but without much concentration on specific details. longer tightly squeezed into the torturing seats of the plane. There has always been the temptation to merge literary genres, to mix autobiography, self-analysis, fiction, facts, reportage, social and cultural analysis, to create a meta-narrative which would explain the various influences on how it came into being." Regarding the narrator’s position, the Swedish researcher considers that "the narrator and protagonist are identical" and the "narration is retrospectively oriented." Considering Hall’s description of the two paradigms of cultural studies, a textual wing and a sociological wing (194), we shall deal primarily with the textual side as a work of recovery for cultural study. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, mad Ophelia sings of her lover and resembles him to a pilgrim: In his Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift uses travel as a satire, while – as early as the 18th century, Joseph Addison defines the "citizen of the world": "There is no place in the town which I so much love to frequent as the Royal Exchange. It is a term deliberately designed to describe many genres and practices, under which can be found autobiography, biography, memoir, diaries, letters, testimonies, auto-ethnography, personal essays and, more recently, digital forms such as blogs and email." [23]. Among the writers included we find David Sedaris (‘the rock star of writers’), Dave Eggers (author of the autobiographical volume A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and Zeitoun) and Hunter S. Thompson, author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Naipaul’s writings can be read as a record of the history of the first four decades of post-independence India. John Steinbeck is worthy of the praise he has received for his contributions to American literature because he added a new genre as well as a new narrative device, depicted the lives of the poor, and went to great lengths to produce his many books. In the words of Norman Douglas, writing in the 1920s, good travel writing “invites the reader to undertake three tours simultaneously: abroad, into the author’s brain, and into his own.” As long as wanderlust exists, an engaging travel essay will appeal to … The cool Dubai breeze hit me for In a review to one of Gertrude Bell’s travel writings, The Arabian Diaries, 1913-1914, Lawrence Davidson has the following to say: "Among the Europeans there was a small group of people who sublimated their dissatisfaction with the Victorian culture of the time into an exploration of those territories and peoples that were the subject of the West’s imperial expansion. (Said, xxi, emphasis added), For the reason that the travelogue reveals the traveller’s motivation for travelling, Sutherland equals it to what he calls "an autobiography of the traveller," autobiography being used in its dictionary sense: "an account of a person’s life written by that person." A special mention will be later made to Naipaul’s autobiographical novels, which definitely stress the autobiographical dimension of his writings. The creation of Google Earth has made the foreign ever more familiar by making the foreign accessible to anyone with access to a computer or internet cafe. [3] Thirty years later, and fifteen years Edward Said – a declared admirer of the genre – wrote in his Culture and Imperialism about its specificity of travelogues: "In your narratives, histories, travel tales and explorations your consciousness was represented as the principal authority, an active point of energy that made sense not just of colonizing activities but of exotic geographies and peoples. Maybe not, but they have all the chances to become so. [12]. One conclusion would be that biography and autobiography are both similar and different in meanings and connotations. Naipaul‘s realism is contrasted with Salman Rushdie‘s Magic Realism. Commercial and political interests in England triggered a growth of the interest in other countries and societies. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, then, the various first-person writings of the eighteenth century began to take shape under the classification of a genre." Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir, Paul John Eakin, Northrop Frye, Michael Sprinkler, Linda Anderson, and Eugen Simion are just a few among the specialists who have contributed attempts at a definition and exegesis of the genre. (Pilling, 1). Therefore, biography "connotes a relatively full account of a particular person’s life, involving the attempt to set forth character, temperament, and milieu, as well as the subject’s activities and experiences" (Abrams 22). Travel writing structure represent a justification by their own form, but they have all the to! Combines elements of science fiction and historical fiction to create a new genre, guide books, writing. 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