Travelling and writing and the form of travel writing: Reconsidering Bill Bryson’s (supposed) postcolonial legacy

Abstract

After surveying the relationship between travel writing and postcolonial theory, this article focuses on two home travel accounts by American travel writer Bill Bryson: The Lost Continent (1989) and Notes from a Small Island (1995). By referring to the work of Debbie Lisle, who has written extensively on Bryson’s travel writing, its aim is to demonstrate that those (supposedly) postcolonial discourses which are said to permeate Bryson’s travelogues about foreign countries also appear in these two texts. Particularly significant is the presence of the discourses of “nostalgia” and “melancholy”, as well as the author’s self-representation as a “unique travel ego” and his widespread use of irony. These strategies, it is argued, depend in the first place not much on the perpetuation of a colonial legacy, but on the fact that travelling and writing are two “practices of knowledge” which promote per se the marking of differences. In this regard, travel writing, as the novelistic genre that derives from such practices, cannot help but reproduce the epistemological distance between the self and the world.