ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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Travel literature is a literary genre that deals with travel, motivations and processes. It generally refers to the act of moving from one place to another by taking a certain path.

It is also called a narrative of travel or odeporic literature (from Greek, from travel). It illustrates people, events, what the author sees in a foreign country or an unusual place; he can also have the form of the so-called travel journal. It is not necessarily an account of what the author-traveler feels to the view of new territories or to the encounter with new cultures; in fact, it tends to trace some objectivity in the travel reports of the eighteenth century, a rational, cosmopolitan and anthropocentric era, and a greater emotionality and subjectivity of the traveller during the period of romanticism, of the motions of the soul.

The extremely heterogeneous products of this literary genre consist essentially of texts or narratives endowed with aspirations, dignity and artistic and narrative thickness, and which have for object one or more travel experiences really lived by the author, and variedly motivated: from the search for pure pleasure of travel, to the experience of the spirit of exploration, or scientific research, up to purposes and usefulness of the most different type, including the most practical purposes.

Rarely it refers to an imaginary or dreamlike shift, or a fantastic itinerary like hallucination due to the effect of narcotics.

General characteristics
While not being able to give itself a certain criteria that allow to delimite the genre in strictly fixed boundaries, the definition of "travelliteration" is usually associated with works whose development corresponds entirely to travel narratives, thus tending to exclude such characterization in those creations whose articulation is only partially affected by those particular experiences.

To be classified as literature must of course have the already mentioned artistic and narrative thickness, moral and values, beyond the simple registration of dates and events, as can be other diaries, for example the diary on board; it can talk about adventure, exploration or discovery, but also be to bucolic or landscape theme, and in this genre can sometimes relapse tourist and journalistic reports.

Literary treatment contains descriptions and news on the social and historical-cultural aspects of the places visited and the people encountered, variedly selected, filtered, with considerations and observations that can range up to aspects of anthropological nature. From the narrative thread of this experience can arise intrecci and developments with a more markedly literary and romance taste.

Tourist guide
On the basis of the approximate definition, it remains, for example, excluded from the hive of the "travel lettering", for several orders of reasons and except for particular cases, the