Peter Whitfield Talks About the History of Travel Literature Peter Whitfield's "Travel: A Literary History" covers a broad genre of writing that includes work by missionaries, empire builders, thrill seekers and satirists. The book ranges from the travel stories of the Bible and the ancient Greeks to 20th-century wanderers like Patrick Leigh Fermor and Bruce Chatwin. In a recent email exchange, Mr. Whitfield discussed his expansive definition travel writing, Christianity's influence on the genre and the best travel books of the 20th century. You wonder - and had me wondering, too - if many of the texts you cite are "really" travel literature, and you say that some are "not travel narratives in the ordinary sense of the word." How would you describe the writing that you focus on in the book? It struck me that travel literature existed for centuries, but not in its own right. It was not a recognized genre, but was always involved with other things - war and conquest, religion, history writing, commerce, science, poetry and so on. I wanted to do justice to this richness, and also, when starting the book I could not identify some arbitrary point when travel literature "in the normal sense" was born. This is why I wanted to talk about Herodotus, Alexander the Great, the Aeneid, the legends of St. Brendan, Dante, Mandeville, St. Francis Xavier, etc., as well as fiction from Thomas Nashe to Bunyan, Defoe, Melville, Conrad and so on. How did the advent of Christianity change the perspective of travel writers? Despite its presence in ancient and classical literature, travel had rarely if ever been central, certainly not personal travel. It seems to me that the pilgrimage narratives (which began in the fourth century after the discovery in Jerusalem of the true cross by St. Helena) marked the emergence of the first-person, truth-telling narrator's voice. It was essential that the holy sites had to be seen and experienced, and the journey to them described - they had to be guaranteed by an eyewitness account. In the 16th century, there was a great deal of exploration, but you say that those who embarked on it couldn't "interpret" what they saw. What do you mean by that? The great figures of the age of discovery were adventurers, men of action, not scholars or writers, and they simply could not articulate the nature or importance of the new worlds. Columbus, for example, never produced a map of where he had been. They were so taken up with claiming territory, finding gold, pleasing their patrons and returning home safely that they had no time for any intellectual response. More's "Utopia" was the first such response, and a radical one, because it imagined the discovery of a higher civilization than the European somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Neither Shakespeare nor any other Elizabethan writers seemed interested in setting a drama in the new world. It's extremely strange how long the question of the existence and nature of parallel civilizations took to emerge in the European mind - perhaps not really until the 18th century. Joseph Hall's "Another World, Yet the Same," from 1605, was "an elaborate parody of the discovery narrative," a very early example of a "thoroughgoing and scornful attack on the travel vogue." Mark Twain also satirized the genre in "The Innocents Abroad." How would you sum up the stance of those who have poked fun at the genre? It is rather amazing to find a satire on travel and travel literature being written as early as 1605! I think Hall's book is a purely theoretical attack on travel and a literary joke. He doesn't seem to have traveled himself. But his book is very ingenious, complete with maps, samples of foreign languages, foreign coins and so on. Twain's "Innocents Abroad" is very different, a satire on the experience of tourist travel by one who had been through it himself. Twain adopts the persona of the rough, honest, no-nonsense Yankee, determined to be unimpressed by almost everything he sees, all the flummery of European so-called culture. But he was probably the first to enunciate the terrible truth about tourism: that what you go to see is spoiled because ten thousand other people are also trying to see it on the same day as you. He wrote this in 1869, and we quake as we wonder what he would say about tourism in 2012. You call "Around the World in Eighty Days" by Jules Verne "surely the most perfect travel fiction ever written." And what are some of the distant runners-up in your opinion? It's the most perfect travel fiction because . . . well actually, this was tongue-in-cheek! It's just a delightful foreign view of the archetypal Englishman. Phileas Fogg travels around the world, and apparently learns nothing. He subdues everything to his will, conquers every obstacle merely because it is his whim, and it's his right as an Englishman to do this. But in the end he falls in love: his mask cracks and his life changes! It's a brilliant book with, after all, quite a deep message. Mass tourism has changed the nature of travel - and not for the better, in your opinion. But you also "don't agree with the common view that so-called real travel writing has necessarily died with so-called real travel." What do current practitioners do to make travel writing fresh when travel itself (even exotic travel) is increasingly common? It's often said that since we can all travel anywhere, what's the point of travel writing? But I think that in a world where so much is phony, we need to find the genuine, and this is what the travel writer is for now: to show us what's under the surface; to warn us what tourism does to us and to the places we visit; make us think before we join the crowds at Venice, Machu Pichu or the Taj Mahal; or to tell us what is going on in Tibet or Zimbabwe. On the other hand, I do believe there should be simply less travel writing published, since it is undoubtedly an aspect of consumerism, and it's all out of hand. What travel books from the 20th century would you most highly recommend to general readers? Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Again, not really a travel book, but it's the story of a man losing one identity and finding another through his experiences in foreign lands, so what else can you call it? His years of desert life and warfare, he said, "Made me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me." It's also written in an amazing, highly wrought poetic language, which can be off-putting at times, and at times absolutely irresistible. Lawrence was definitely a man with something to reveal and something to hide - he was an intellectual who had wallowed in bloodshed. I read "On the Road" for first time when researching this book, and I was bowled over: Kerouac really found a way of putting the wellsprings of his own life down on the page. I think Kerouac has links with Whitman and Thoreau and Robert Lowell: he opens up the soul of America. In a lighter vein, I think Paul Theroux is a genius. He was just what travel writing needed, to democratize it and tell the truth about modern travel.