Jeffrey Alan Melton on “travel literature”:
Travel literature is a varied genre in which overlapping elements of journalism, autobiography, fiction, history, anthropology, and political analysis, among others, combine into a smorgasbord narrative. As a composite literary form, it resists neat categorization. (340-41)
“Mark Twain and Travel Writing.” A Companion to Mark Twain. Eds. Peter Messent and Louis J. Budd. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 338-53.
Despite the smorgasbord composition, though, travel writing, Melton notes, relies on “a strong sense of self and place” (341). I will try to get at some of the complexities this dialectic spawns.