Known since antiquity, travel writing has not only enjoyed great popularity in the West, but it has also played a crucial role in the cultural history of the Americas since the late 15th century. Although recordings of pre-contact indigenous travels in the Americas exist (see e.g. Boone 1994), the travelogue as a literary genre was introduced to the region by the European colonizers. It has since been catering to the desire of broadening audiences for geographic and cultural knowledge of unfamiliar places and peoples, for economic, socio-political, or strategic information, as well as for entertainment through captivating stories (Blanton 2002, 7-29). Increasingly diverse, though predominantly Eurocentric for most of its history, the genre has contributed to formulating and circulating hegemonic concepts and "imagined geographies" (Said 1995, 55, 71) of "America" (Rabasa 1993; Mignolo 2005) that inform public discourses, knowledge, and power relations to this day.
Defining travel writingTravel writing is a hybrid genre that borders on, as well as incorporates, elements of various other text types such as novels, autobiographies, reports, legends, diaries, letters, tracts, or essays, and may, therefore, be difficult to distinguish from them (Ette 2003, 25-26; Guzmán Rubio 2011, 113-14). Its thematic and formal eclecticism render it a "frictional literature" that oscillates between fictional and factual writing or even challenges their distinction altogether (Ette 2003, 31). Common subdivisions of this body of writing are based on the writers' countries of origin, their travel destinations, or their modes of journeying (Ette 2003, 17; Fernández Bravo 2007, 3-4), on categories of travelers, journeys, or text types like the travel diary or memoir (Blanton 2002, 2-4; Guzmán Rubio 2011, 115-27), or on different approaches to dealing with extratextual reality (Nünning 2008, 27-28). In its broadest sense, "travel writing" may refer to all kinds of texts that depict a physical journey, including accounts openly acknowledging their entirely fictitious nature. Narrow definitions limit the term to denote only narratives of actual travels penned with a subjective, "literary purpose" and the intention of public dissemination (Blanton 2002, 4-5). This chapter takes a middle ground here: it defines the genre as encompassing both private and publication-oriented
