Travel from Europe and the Middle East

Tourism began in the early modern period as travel for education. At this time, travel was seen as an important pedagogical capstone. In England, such important social and literary figures as Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) took the "grand tour" (an extended visit to important cities and courts of continental Europe) as an appropriate way to conclude their education in the arts of politics and culture. Ideally, the grand tour introduced its practitioner to the languages and polite societies of the Continent; practically, a number of English critics of this type of travel complained that it led to students coming back with French affectations and fashions, German manners, and Italian diseases. The playwright Thomas Nashe penned an ingenious satiric journey for his picaresque traveler Jack Wilton in The Unfortunate Traveler (1594). In the realm of nonfiction, the Oxford-educated eccentric Thomas Coryate penned his voluminous Crudities (1611), in which he paints himself as the innocent abroad, coming into contact with various kinds of picaresque adventures while undertaking a perhaps not-so-grand tour through the Continent. That Coryate had elements of the explorer in himself as well is evident from his death in India while on a more far-flung journey. George Sandys's Relation of a Journey Begun Anno Domini 1610 combines the structures of pilgrimage narrative with the motivations of the practitioner of the grand tour.

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, travel became more consciously literary. Such figures as Samuel Johnson and James Boswell melded the tour of the countryside with autobiography, biography, and the essay, while Romantic period authors in Britain and on the Continent celebrated the imaginative potential of journeys through the natural world. This sort of travel often allied itself to the emerging genre of the novel, in which the physical journeys of various protagonists were paralleled by their interior development, sometimes with comic results.

However, travel could never fully become tourism until the level of danger inherent in the activity had diminished. One could say that tourism was born in Europe with the guides of Baedecker during the Victorian period and in America with the closing of the frontier in the late 1800s. But there had always been a sense of conflict between the "true" traveler and the mob of others; as early as the fourteenth century, Margery Kempe, the English mystic and pilgrim, lamented the motivations (curiosity and good fellowship) of her fellow pilgrims, to the point that her traveling companions attempted to strand her in Rome because of her constant moral hectoring. But with the advent of technology, one of the cachets of travel, its attendant dangers, had been removed. Thus, with the rise of tourism, a new tension arose in the image of travel: that between the true traveler and the tourist. While tourists stick to the instructions of Baedecker and travel in herds, the true traveler takes the road untraveled (at least by Europeans).

For literary travelers, this tension between tourism and other forms of travel produced much fruit. It would probably be a mistake to count various tourist guides as literary productions, but traveling authors have gained much ironic material by their appropriation of and resistance to the activities and material of tourism. During the early to mid-twentieth century, as well, there were still substantial portions of the globe generally off limits to tourists for political or other reasons. Modern authors tended to seek out just those sorts of marginal journeys.

Between the world wars, literary travelers often took the pose of ironists or reporters, sometimes espousing specific ideological points of view and sometimes using the profits gained by writing travel volumes to finance more "serious" literary pursuits. The English authors Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh traveled extensively: Waugh used his journeys in the Mediterranean and South America as well as his stint as a reporter in Africa to provide material for some of his satiric novels. André Gide's travels in Africa and the Mideast animated his sense of the ideal artistic life: to construct a careful equilibrium between the exotic and the familiar.

The contemporary literary traveler becomes a complexly folded narrator, taking an ironic stance, not just toward other cultures but often toward other travelers and even to him- or herself. Contemporary travel writing partakes of many genres and modes: novelistic, picaresque, satiric, and contemplative. Even the ancient motif of flight and return is explored as a means of self-discovery. For postmodernity, travel becomes a means of self-discovery or self-exploration.