Friday, 2 March 2018

On Travelogues and Travel Writing in Literature - III


Travels with My Donkey (2004), is yet another nonfiction work by Tim Moore. It is a humorous nonfiction account of the author’s attempt to follow the five hundred-mile pilgrimage road to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, with a donkey.

Having no knowledge of Spanish and even less about the care and feeding of donkeys, Tim Moore, Britain's indefatigable traveling Everyman, sets out on a pilgrimage to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela with a donkey named Shinto as his companion. Armed only with a twelfth-century handbook to the route and expert advice on donkey management from Robert Louis Stevenson, Moore and his four-legged companion travel the ancient five-hundred-mile route from St. Jean Pied-de-Port, on the French side of the Pyrenees, to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela which houses the remains of Spain's patron saint, St. James.

The Amber Spyglass (2000), is a novel by Philip Pullman. In this last book of the His Dark Materials fantasy trilogy, the young heroine Lyra (seemingly named after the lyre, the musical instrument Orpheus played) travels to an underworld drawn from Greek myth and leads its inhabitants out. His Dark Materials is an epic trilogy of fantasy novels by Philip Pullman which follows the coming of age of two children, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, as they wander through a series of parallel universes.

Jack Kerouac is rightfully called a ‘road novelist.’ One of the leading lights of the Beat generation, Kerouac wrote On the Road in the year 1957, a stream of consciousness  travelogue of America in the early 1950s. On The Road is considered to be a seminal post-war work, and its setting and theme make for an engaging read. The novel captures the author Jack Kerouac and his friends’ travels across North America. The author is the main protagonist in the story, and it is set against the backdrop of music, poetic literature, and drug abuse.

Jules Verne was a French writer who helped pioneer the genre of science fiction; novels such as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea explored underwater and space travel before either was technologically possible. Along with writers like Mark Twain, Conrad was able to incorporate traditional story forms—such as travelogues or journey stories—into novels with a more contemporary sensibility.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea also known under its longer title, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the World, is a classic science fiction novel In the story, Captain Nemo pilots his vessel, the Nautilus, on an adventure in search of a sea monster that was sighted by a number of ships in 1866. The American government sponsors the mission. This great adventure story is notable for being more scientifically accurate than some of Verne's other novels. In particular, the description of the Nautilus is rather prophetic and a fitting description for modern submarines. While there were submarines in existence when the book was written, they were primitive affairs and it took a feat of imagination for the writer to produce his vision of what an underwater craft would look like in the future.

James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl, recounts the fantastic tale of a young boy who travels thousands of miles in a house-sized peach with as bizarre an assemblage of companions as can be found in a children’s book. The plot centres on a young English orphan boy who enters a gigantic, magical peach, and has a wild and surreal cross-world adventure with seven magically-altered garden bugs he meets. They set off on a journey to escape from James' two mean and cruel aunts.

Daniel Defoe, in his Robinson Crusoe employs the form of a travel biography. The work tells the story of a man marooned on a Caribbean island.

Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, Joseph Andrews, and Tom Jones are influenced by the ‘‘picaresque’’—a Spanish genre about the adventures of a trickster or rogue hero, traveling from place to place, getting into trouble with authority figures, and escaping by use of his cleverness and charm.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), is a novel by Mark Twain. In this picaresque novel about a trip on a raft down the Mississippi River, Twain shows what is great and enduring about life in the South, but Huck also encounters all the forces of racism, corruption, and greed that mark a turn of the corner in Southern life on the eve of the Civil War.

Maurice Gee Gee’s ‘‘most ambitious fantasy work for young adults’’ is the ‘‘O’’ trilogy—composed of The Halfmen of O (1982), The Priests of Ferris (1984), and Motherstone (1985). The trilogy involves young protagonists who travel to a fantasy world to help restore the balance between good and evil. The character development and the treatment of the morality theme have prompted some reviewers to compare the trilogy to C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.

Oliver Goldsmith's wanderings provided the inspiration for several later works, including The Traveller and the adventures of George Primrose in The Vicar of Wakefield.

Journey Without Maps, is Graham Greene's nonfiction travelogue recounting his audacious 1935 trip through Liberia, on the western coast of Africa. World travel was an integral part of Greene’s life and .work.

The Good Soldier Svejk, by Jaroslav Haลกek is above all else an adventure novel—a novel about the travels and travails of its protagonist. It literally translated as, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier ล vejk During the World War. Svejk has become a byword in the Czech Republic. The book is also the most translated novel of Czech literature, having been translated into over 50 languages.

to be contd...

Image courtesy: goodreads.com
Text Source(s): Britannica, goodreads, Amazon Book Store, Gale, & Routledge

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