Long popular with a general readership, travel writing has, in the past three decades or so, become firmly established as an object of serious and multi-disciplinary academic inquiry. Few of the scholarly and popular publications that have focused on the nineteenth century have regarded the century as a whole. This broad volume examines the cultural and social aspects of travel writing on Africa, Asia, America, the Balkans and Australasia.

Long popular with a general readership, travel writing has, in the past three decades or so, become firmly established as an object of serious and multi-disciplinary academic inquiry. Few of the scholarly and popular publications that have focused on the nineteenth century have regarded the century as a whole. This broad volume examines the cultural and social aspects of travel writing on Africa, Asia, America, the Balkans and Australasia. An additional key feature of the volume will be its inclusion of different types of traveller. Several types of travellers and travel texts are considered in the collection. The volume includes studies of explorers, missionaries, artists and writers, Romantics and socialists, colonialists and indigenes. It covers, therefore, a range of travels, travellers, and travellers' texts, and aims to establish some of the contexts in which travel took place. This volume is as much about departure points as it is about destinations, revealing the prejudices and precepts of the nineteenth-century traveller.