Three Variations on the Road to the Far East: On Strategies for Generating Cultural Difference in Polish Travel Writing from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
As a branch of writing, travel literature poses a range of hurdles to any attempts at theoretical, methodological, genealogical or poetic classification. In a canonical reference book for philologists in Poland, Dictionary of Literary Terms (Słownik terminów literackich), Janusz Sławiński defers to the broadest possible definition for the genre, arguing that travel literature operates between two poles: that which is “fully factual” sits on one end of the spectrum, while on the other, we find contrived travel tales both realistic and fantastical. (...)