The Dictionary of Human Geography

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connected to each destination by a route with

a specified unit cost. Problems with this simple

spatial structuremay be solved very effi-

ciently, and the method is used in both public

sector (e.g. allocating pupil to schools) and

business (cheapest routing of distribution),

though many recent applications use a more

general network structure. lwh

Suggested reading

Hay (1977); Taaffe and Gauthier (1973).

travel writing A genre of prose about the

experience of being away from home. While

travel writing ineuropecan be traced back to

Homer’sOdyssey, it has rarely been considered

either seriousliteratureor credibleethnog-

raphy, and was typically excluded from the

conventional history of geography (seegeog-

raphy, history of). In the past several dec-

ades, however, the genre has been reassessed

within thehumanitiesand the social sciences,

and there has been a resurgence of critical

interest in travel writing. This can be traced

to a number of broader changes in academic

fashion. One was the rise ofpostmodernism,

which validated the study of popular forms of

culture, including writing, rather than simply

‘the Greats’. Within many of the social sci-

ences, postmodernism was closely associated

with acultural turnthat focused greater

attention on practices ofrepresentation.A

second, related source of interest in travel writ-

ing was the development ofpost-colonialism

and the key role played by literary scholar

Edward Said (1935–2003) in its articulation.

The success of Said’s (2003 [1978]) critique

of orientalism created a multidisciplinary

growth industry in the study of colonial repre-

sentations of other places and peoples. Travel

writings were seen as primary sources for the

recovery ofimaginative geographies. A third

influence wasfeminism, which showed that

nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century travel

accounts written by women were important but

marginalized sites of the production of geo-

graphical knowledge (indeed, they had been

marginalized by Said too) (cf. McEwan, 2000).

Withinhuman geography, interest in travel

writing has had a number of different foci.

Among these has been a renewed interest in

records and writings produced under the signs

ofexplorationandscience, but now read

critically astexts, using the resources of the

literary as well as the historical disciplines to

disclose the multiple ways in which thedis-

course of exploration and enumeration

worked to produce its objects of inquiry. As

the discourse of Orientalism produced ‘the

Orient’, for example, so the discourse oftro-

picalityproduced ‘the Tropics’ (Driver and

Martins, 2005). Such studies feed into an

interest in the spaces through which scientific

knowledges are produced, the channels

through which they circulate and the centres

at which they accumulate. The same spatial

thematics animate studies of travel writing

outside the nominally scientific domain

(Gregory, 2001a). In Europe, the distinction

between ‘travel’ and ‘tourism’ is an historical

one, freighted with assumptions about edifica-

tion and independence that register a series of

classdistinctions. But travellers and tourists

throughout the nineteenth and on into the

twentieth centuries had a compulsion towrite

their journeys, and the critical scrutiny of their

texts has much to tell us about not only the

production, and on occasion the disruption, of

cultural stereotypes and processes oftrans-

culturation (Pratt, 1992) – few travellers

arrived at their destination with their cultural

baggage intact and simply unpacked it to make

pre-configured sense of what they saw – but

alsoabout theformation of nationaliden-

titiesand the consolidation of bourgeoiscul-

ture(Buzard, 1993; Duncan and Gregory,

1999). Travellers did not only write diaries,

journals and letters; they also sketched,

painted, and took photographs, and the inter-

rogation of this visual archive has been of con-

siderable importance in the recovery and

analysis of cultural constructions oflandscape

in particular (Stafford, 1984; Osborne, 2000;

Schwartz and Ryan, 2003). Travel was also

historically coded through notations ofgen-

derandsexuality, and there has been a not-

able interest in the ways in which travel could

permit the realization ofdesireandtransgres-

sion that was simply impossible at home

(Aldrich, 1993; Boone, 1995; Gregory, 1995a).

This brief summary suggests a series of la-

cuna in work on travel writing that are only

now starting to be addressed. First, research

has been dominated by studies of European

and North American travellers beyond their

own shores – but what of the ‘return gaze’

(e.g. Burton, 1998)? Second, the texts under

closest scrutiny were typically produced by

those whochoseto travel under the signs of

science, culture or pleasure – but what of the

experiences of those who were obliged to

travel under other signs: commerce, capture

or duty (e.g. Colley, 2002), or as fugitives

from disaster orwar(seerefugees)? Third,

much of this work has fastened on historical

rather than contemporary writings, a focus

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_T Final Proof page 774 31.3.2009 9:40pm Compositor Name: ARaju

TRAVEL WRITING