Travel Writing - Einzelansicht

Travelogues are a specific literary genre with a long history back to antiquity. Travel has been undertaken for political, religious, educational and commercial, but lately also for leisure reasons. A common travel proverb says: `The world is a book, and those who do not travel, read only a page.` This alludes to the textuality of `the world` that needs reading/deciphering. and it leads us the awareness that travel links to aspects of status, means and priviledge, to knowledge and authority.
In this context, the course will focus on relationships between power and knowledge, the authority of eyewitness and the discursive situatedness of the traveller/reader: Special focus will be allotted to Victorian travel writing and 19th-century (gendered) representations of the British Empire.

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