Travel writing: Always has always will be

Abstract

Travel writing has changed over the past fifty years to reflect the fact, as Jan Morris has said, that ‘nearly everyone has been nearly everywhere’ (Morris 2009). In the 21st century, travel writing has become a medium for authors to investigate their own lives as much as to explore exotic destinations. Examples of this ‘recording (of) the experience rather than the event’ (Morris 2009) in travel writing include: John Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996) and Into Thin Air (1997), Pico Iyer’s Global Soul (2001), Robert MacFarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2013) and Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path (2018). The switch to a more character-focused, experiential-based style of travel writing reflects the genre’s roots in one of the world’s oldest story structures, namely the journey narrative. It is through this connection that we can identify some of the universal structures behind successful contemporary travel writing; the ability to look objectively at life by placing oneself in a liminal space (Turner 1964, Mahdi 1987), and the fact that travel and narrative is in all of us through our ancestral memories of Homo sapiens’ seventy-millennia long history of migration around the globe (Harari 2011, Mithen 2005, Tattersall 2008).