This collection of travel writing is focussed on English language publications by
predominantly Western-background travellers writing in the nineteenth, twentieth,
and twenty-first centuries. The coincidence of this time frame with the increasing
influence of the trends of modernity and postmodernity, and secularisation should not
be dismissed. In this period, as MacCannell, and Duncan and Gregory argue, travel
and travel writing became part of the project of modernity69. In this vein, in the
introduction to the 1989 edition of The Tourist, MacCannell states that he initially
wanted to study tourists “as a method of gaining access to the process by which
modernity, modernization, modern culture was establishing its empire on a global
basis”70. It was a period that Duncan and Gregory see as one in which travel writing
“meshed with secularisation”, and religious frames of reference were moved aside by
more complex divisions of cultural difference and the natural sciences71. However, it
was also a period in which advances in technology brought travel from the status of
something for only pilgrims, merchants, and explorers, to one of a leisure activity.
Yet, whilst Duncan and Gregory see the importance of the processes of modernity and
secularisation in the history of leisured travel and travel writing, they miss entirely the
importance of pilgrimage as the forerunner and historical source of modern tourism.
Further, while travellers of many kinds through history have written accounts of their
journeys, the phenomena of ‘travel writing’ is relatively new, which McMillin sees as
emerging out of the British and European colonial era move to make sense of ‘the
other’ in relation to the ‘self