12 Facts About Travel literature

Genre of travel literature encompasses outdoor literature, guide books, nature writing, and travel memoirs.

One early travel memoirist in Western literature was Pausanias, a Greek geographer of the 2nd century CE.

Early examples of travel literature include the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, Pausanias' Description of Greece in the 2nd century CE, Safarnama by Nasir Khusraw, the Journey Through Wales and Description of Wales by Gerald of Wales, and the travel journals of Ibn Jubayr, Marco Polo, and Ibn Battuta, all of whom recorded their travels across the known world in detail.

Travel literature then wrote about his climb, making allegorical comparisons between climbing the mountain and his own moral progress in life.

In 18th-century Britain, travel literature was highly popular, and almost every famous writer worked in the travel literature form; Gulliver's Travels, for example, is a social satire imitating one, and Captain James Cook's diaries were the equivalent of today's best-sellers.

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One tourism literature pioneer was Robert Louis Stevenson with An Inland Voyage, and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, about his travels in the Cevennes, is among the first popular books to present hiking and camping as recreational activities, and tells of commissioning one of the first sleeping bags.

Travel literature books come in styles ranging from the documentary, to the literary, as well as the journalistic, and from memoir to the humorous to the serious.

Travel literature was awarded in 1989 the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for Riding the Iron Rooster.

Travel literature journal, called road journal, is a record made by a traveller, sometimes in diary form, of the traveler's experiences, written during the course of the journey and later edited for publication.

Writings of escaped slaves of their experience under slavery and their escape from it is a type of travel literature that developed during the 18th and 19th centuries, detailing how slaves escaped the restrictive laws of the southern United States and the Caribbean to find freedom.

Travel literature blogs were among the first instances of blogging, which began in the mid-1990s.

Systematic study of travel literature emerged as a field of scholarly inquiry in the mid-1990s, with its own conferences, organizations, journals, monographs, anthologies, and encyclopedias.