The Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys in Search of a Genre

Abstract

The Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys in Search of a Genre is both a monograph on (mostly) British travel writing and a travel book in which Tim Hannigan, its author, narrator and principal character, travels to various locations to interview 13 travel writers, one travel writing scholar (Carl Thompson), one publisher of travel books (Barnaby Rogerson), and a group of travel writing readers; he journeys to a travel writing academic conference (in Berlin) and to search, in libraries (in Eton, Penzance, Leicester and Edinburgh) and in one cathedral (in St Albans), for textual and non-textual evidence of the origins and developments of the genre of travel writing. Two hundred and ninety-five years after Jonathan Swift (anonymously) published a book in which he used the format of what was then known as “voyages and travels” to create a satire on various aspects of British society and its travel writers, Tim Hannigan uses the travel book format to voice the most pertinent questions about the nature, the past and the future of both travel writing and the academic discipline of travel writing studies. In Chapter Two of his book Hannigan declares “What I needed was a definition” (17), and having discussed the definitions of the genre provided by four Anglophone travel writing scholars (Fussell, Raban, Thompson and Youngs), settles for the definition by Jan Borm: