Ambience and nature in travel writing: An ecostylistic study of The Old Patagonian Express and Eastward to Tartary

Abstract The present paper explores descriptions of natural landscapes excerpted from two travel books, namely, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train through the Americas, by Paul Theroux, and Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucasus, by Robert D. Kaplan. The paper aims at analyzing how certain linguistic choices in a given stretch of text conspire to construe the ambience of descriptive passages of natural landscapes in travel writing. This will be carried out by combining insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Frame Semantics (FS). I will be focusing on the ambience of the natural depictions, that is, the sense of the natural world evoked in the reader’s mind by the language of the text. This will be dealt with by examining the lexical choices made by both authors, paying special attention to the adjectives. The excerpts under investigation have been selected since the descriptive language in them evokes frames and conceptual domains, which, in turn, yield a series of metaphors. These metaphors summarize the tone of the travel books, that is, the authorial texture and, especially, the ideological stance of the authors. Paul Theroux displays a more empathetic approach to the surrounding nature and its people, whereas Robert D. Kaplan adopts a more distant, analytical stance.