Travel Writing In The 19th Century

explorers, soldiers, sailors, surveyors, missionari es, merchants, scientists, colonial administrators, diplomats, journalists, artists and many others besides. Through all the types of text they produced in great variety of mem oir, newspaper, journals etc., all of this material arguably constitutes a form of travel writing which has directly or subtly played role in expansion of Europe and United State s in this era. Capitalist influence spread in three main ways. Emigration created marke ts. It continued on a large scale in this period although mainly in the form of the r einforcement of existing European communities overseas. Secondly, world trade vastly increased in volume because

European industries required both raw materials and markets.

First category is the work of sailors; major non-European polities which maintained political independence from Europe are t he second category, a third category is the Americas, the fourth category is Br itish settler colonies, and the fifth region, Equatorial Africa.

One of the most important forms of travel writing i n this era of high imperialism was the exploration narrative. From Cha rles Darwin’s Voyage of the

Beagle (1839) to the accounts of Amazon basin, interiors o f Africa to the long tradition of polar exploration reports supplied the intellectual centres of Europe and

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America with an abundance of information about well -nigh every region of the globe.

At the same time, they also gripped the popular ima gination. Explorers came to be regarded as emblematic figures, ideal types of impe rial masculinity who embodied the highest ideals of science and Christian civilizatio n. Their travel experiences were increasingly rendered in a stirring style that drew significantly on the literary techniques and idioms developed in another burgeoni ng nineteenth-century genre, the imperial adventure stories that one associates with writers like Fredrick

The period from 1880 to 1940 was the heyday of the British Empire, and much travel writing shows the complicity with imper ialism. This period is best seen as the beginning of the era of globalization, a pro cess set in motion by that vast expansion of territorial colonialism in the late ni neteenth century, and one that continues today through neo-colonialism and economi c imperialism. Meanwhile, J.G.

Frazer’s influential The Golden Bough (1890) identified savagery close beneath the surface of British society, and put Christianity on par with pagan or primitive myth.

Psychoanalysis demonstrated the fragility of civili zed rationality. Suspicion of the

‘masses’ undermined nationalist ideologies. Identit ies, either of self or other, were no longer stable. Homi Bhabha has influentially writte n of the colonists’ anxieties provoked by their colonial servants (Hulmes & Young s 73).

The travel theme and the depiction of foreign peopl es and places, was frequently taken up by the writers working in more obviously imaginative or fictive genre. In twentieth century, it often became as an alternative form of writing