Page - 7 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal, Vol. 6 2020, 7–20 Open Access: content is licensed under CC BY 3.0 ‘To travel is to see’, writes Bernard McGrane (1989: 116), and writing about travelling is thus an attempt to grasp what has been seen — in words and/or visually. Accordingly, travel literature deals not only with written texts but with visual elements, whether maps, pictures, drawings, photographs, sketches, (out)looks, viewpoints, or other media, regardless of whether they are displayed visually or drawn with words. An arbitrary list of travelogue (and travel blog) titles reveals the intrinsic relationship between text and image: Pictures from Italy; Italienisches Bilderbuch; Sketches of Spain; Impressions de voyage; Reiseaufnahmen; Blickgewinkelt (cf. Alù and Hill 2018: 6). Illustrations produced on the road, as well as visual material added later, have long been an integral part of travel writing. Visual material can convey information that cannot be verbalized. The visual can also lend authenticity to what was experienced and nar- rated, underscoring the credibility of the traveller/narrator. At the same time, the visual guides the reader’s perspective and tends to strengthen certain viewpoints even more than texts do. Nevertheless, visual depictions only seem to be more realistic, as Giorgia Alù and Sarah Patricia Hill remind us: ‘[visual representation] distorts rather than reflects social reality’ (2018: 1). Illu- strations in travel writing thus partake in the construction of difference, of images of the self and the other, and consequently in the emergence of stereotypes and clichés. This special issue of Mobile Culture Studies — The Journal is dedicated to this complex relation between text and the visual in travel writing. It grew out of two transdisciplinary work- shops held at the University of Vienna within the framework of the research platform Mobile Cultures and Societies: Interdisciplinary Studies on Transnational Formations and the Marie-Skłodowska-Curie project European Travel Writing in Context.1 The workshops were dedicated, first, to the intersection of travel writing (studies) and mobility (studies) more gene- rally, and second, to the present focus on the relation between text and images in travel writing. 1 For more information on the two projects, see https://mobilecultures.univie.ac.at and https://travelwriting.uni-mainz.de. Travel Writing On the interplay between text and the visual Birgit Englert, Sandra Vlasta