Scholarly record

THE TYPOLOGY OF TRAVELOGUES IN NORTH AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING: FICTION VS NON-FICTION

D. Ozola, E. Badina, S. Meskova, J. Antonevica

Abstract

The genre of travelogue is regarded as one of the most readable in the contemporary North American literature. Its popularity has grown in the latest decades due to the processes of globalization and new technological developments in the world. People travel a lot; new, exotic places become of utmost interest; new typologically various travelogues appear. The question of belonging of travel narrative to fiction or non-fiction remains disputable; the frames of each are very controversial. Thus, the aim of the present article is to trace the main features of travelogue as a genre, to analyse its typology and the poetic features of a fiction travel narratives basing on the works by the American Kira Salak and Canadian writer Alice Munro. Salak’s travelogue “The White Mary” (2008), the actions of which take place in Papua New Guinea and the Congo and are largely based on the writer’s own experiences, is a contemporary example of a real life journey transformed into a work of fiction. Munro’s collection of stories “Too Much Happiness” (2009) binds the motif of travel with the heroine’s identity quest, bringing out a complex dynamics of feminine self-reflection. In the frames of the contemporary critical tradition the study of travelogues synthesizes various methodologies and methods of different literary schools with an aim to excerpt the brightest semantic oppositions of travelogues. The present research is the study of travelogues applying structurally-semiotic method, thus focusing on such binary oppositions typical of travel narratives as self – the other, native – foreign / exotic, home – travel, nature – civilization.

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