ABSTRACT:
The concept of travel is related to the categories of border. It is a transitional phenomenon implying transgression and communication sometimes, differentiation and opposition other times; it also implies the voyage across a liminal space (a threshold, a bridge or a crossroad); it is the overstep between two symbolic geographies, different civilizations, cultures, religions, races, or divergent ideologies and political systems. In ideal situations, the voyage is an opportunity for mutual knowledge and understanding between the traveler and the foreigner. A starting point in the analysis of British travel literature to the East or the Orient, America or Africa, is the observation that of all the literary genres, travel writing in the Romantic period emerges as perhaps "the most capacious cultural holdall" (Amanda Gilroy): a hybrid discourse that traversed the disciplinary boundaries of politics, letter-writing, education, ethnography, anthropology, natural history, medicine, aesthetics, and economics. Indeed, the archaeological and anthropological research that was part of Britain's colonial project found its form in travel writing. Travelers often sought to cross more than national boundaries. Sometimes the circulating discourses of travel secured self-identity and reaffirmed existing convictions of cultural superiority for the authors and readers of travel accounts, but the experience of geographic displacement also helped Romantic-era writers to renegotiate the cultural verities of "home". Nevertheless, the disturbances of travel could destabilize not only the hierarchies of disciplines and genres, but also the boundaries of national, racial, gender and class affiliation, thus enacting the disciplinary miscegenation that defined the mapping of geographical space.
