“The notions of home and abroad in travel writing.” (original) (raw)

Any geographical movement implies a distance from home. Home represents the norm, the known and the habitual; it is the territory where everything looks familiar and inherent to the traveller’s understanding. Abroad, on the contrary, symbolizes the unusual, the foreign. It is through the experience of travel that the writer faces this distinction. In an unknown land, home may be envisioned as an idyllic surrounding; but leaving home behind may also be a liberating alternative that determines the traveller’s contentment. To explore the notions of home and abroad in travel writing would be the starting point of this essay. The space of belonging can be deconstructed and reshaped with every step the traveller takes on his route. Through assimilation and identification with the other, the concept of home is shattered: the familiar turns unfamiliar, abroad is no longer so foreign. The domestic setting does not necessarily imply a fixed location; though, as James Clifford states, “roots always precede routes”, the traveller may widen his earliest vision of home by considering any place he comes across in his path as a promising site for settlement. What, then, is the distinction between home and non-home? Where exactly is home at the end of the journey? To what extent are the notions of home and abroad opposite terms? These are essential queries to the genre, and some of their possible answers may be found in the literary records of many travel writers, from Mark Twain and Henry James to Bill Bryson and Jonathan Raban.