Introductory description

This final-year advanced option explores the long history of travel and travel writing from Homer’s Odyssey to present-day tourism. Taking a global perspective, the module provides students with a broad chronological and geographical framework to explore critical themes and concepts in the literature on travel and travel writing, including questions relating to gender, race, Orientalism, colonialism, sexuality, and relations between Self and Other and between humans and their environment. This module makes use of a range of primary sources, including travel accounts, travel advice literature, maps, paintings, and engravings, and draws on approaches from history, literature, anthropology, and postcolonial studies. As a module on travel, an integral component is the site visit to Leamington Spa and/or another field trip location.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Term 1

1. Travel and Travel Writing: A Global Genre
2. Herodotus and Zhang Qian: Travel and ‘the Other’ in the Ancient World
3. Xuanzang and Ennin: The Medieval Buddhist Experience
4. Pilgrimage and Hajj: Spiritual Journeys in Christianity and Islam
5. Fact and Fabrication: Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta
6. Reading week – no seminar
7. Cannibals, Antipodes & Prester John: Travel and Mental Geographies
8. New Worlds and the Trope of Discovery: Columbus to Cook
9. Savage and Civilized: Travel and Ethnography in Europe, India, and China
10. Europe Observed: Islamic Travellers in Christian Lands

Term 2
11. Voyages Gone Wrong: Shipwreck and Captivity
12. How to Travel? Ars Apodemica and the Grand Tour
13. The Male Gaze: Sexuality and the Exotic in Pacific Voyaging
14. A Female Gaze? Women's Travel Writing and Alterity
15. Forced Travel: Narratives of the Enslaved
16. Reading week – no seminar
17. Scientific Travel, Romanticism, and the Natural World
18. Travel and Imperialism in the Age of Livingstone
19. Travellers from the Global South
20. Tourism and the Environment in a Postcolonial World

Term 3
21. Essay Workshop
22. Essay Workshop

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a systematic knowledge and understanding of the forms and traditions of global travel and its effects on past societies and the world today, as well as of traditions of travel writing and travellers’ engagement with foreign societies
• Critically analyse and evaluate a broad range of primary sources relating to the history of travel and travel writing, including a range of textual and visual sources, through a multi-disciplinary lens
• Effectively communicate ideas, and make informed, coherent and persuasive arguments, relating to the history of travel and travel writing
• Critically review and consolidate theoretical, methodological, and historiographical ideas relating to themes in the literature on travel and travel writing, including gender, race, Orientalism, colonialism, sexuality, and the environment
• Critically engage with the methodology of global history and with a plurality of sources, actors, histories and perspectives from around the world

Indicative reading list

• Alam Muzaffar, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries: 1400-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
• Campbell, Mary B., The Witness and the other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988)
• Casson, Lionel, Travel in the Ancient World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994)
• Das, Nandini, and Tim Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)
• Dunn, Ross E., The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the 14th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)
• Elsner, Jás, and Joan-Pau Rubiés (eds.), Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel (London: Reaktion Books, 1999)
• Euben, Roxanne L., Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)
• Faroqhi, Suraiya, Pilgrims and Sultans: The Haj under the Ottomans, 1517-1683 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014)
• Fisher, Michael H., Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain 1600-1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004)
• Foster, Shirley, and Sara Mills (eds.), An Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002)
• Gosch, Steven, and Peter Stearns, Premodern Travel in World History (New York: Routledge, 2008)
• Green, Nile (ed.), Writing Travel in Central Asian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014)
• Greenblatt, Stephen, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991)
• Hartog, François, Janey Lloyd (trans.), The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)
• Holland, Patrick, and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998)
• Hooper, Glenn, and Tim Youngs (eds.), Perspectives on Travel Writing (New York: Routledge, 2017)
• Hulme, Peter, and Tim Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
• Khair, Tabish, Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing (Oxford: Signal Books, 2006)
• Lach, Donald F., Asia in the Making of Europe (3 Vols. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1965-1993)
• Legassie, Shane Aaron, The Medieval Invention of Travel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)
• Lisle, Debbie, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
• Matar, Nabil (ed.), In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003)
• Mills, Sara, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1991)
• Phillips, Kim M., Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245-1510 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)
• Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992)
• Rubiés, Joan-Pau, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India Through European Eyes, 1250-1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• Siegel, Kristie (ed.), Gender, Genre, & Identity in Women’s Travel Writing (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004).
• Singh, Jyotsna G., Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of Colonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996)
• Tagliacozzo, The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)
• Thompson, Carl (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing (New York: Routledge, 2015)
• Thompson, Carl, Travel Writing (London and New York, Routledge, 2011)
• Touati, Houari, Lydia G. Cochrane (trans.), Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)
• Wood, Frances, Did Marco Polo Go To China? (Boulder: Routledge, 1996)
• Wriggings, Sally Hovy, The Silk Road Journey with Xuanzang (Boulder, Westview Press, 2004)
• Youngs, Tim, The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.