Page - 8 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

8 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Birgit Englert, Sandra Vlasta | Travel Writing In what follows, we begin by briefly discussing travel writing, before moving on to reflect on travel writing studies, mobility studies, and the relationship between them. After providing a definition of our understanding of ‘text’ and the ‘visual’, we offer an overview of the themes and topics covered in the following articles. Work on this issue began under normal conditions; given the worldwide COVID pandemic, however, our contributors were ultimately forced to write and revise, and our reviewers forced to evaluate, under difficult circumstances — circum- stances that we clearly wish to acknowledge. Although we were all heavily affected by these events, given the real-time nature of the pandemic, they could not be dealt with from a critical point of view in the present articles. Travel writing and travel writing studies Written documents about travel make up one of the oldest literary genres, the roots of which date back to antiquity. People record their experiences of journeys for different reasons: some aim to provide a resource for other travellers, for instance, while others seek to teach and enter- tain, perhaps even intending their travelogues to serve as a form of autobiography. Throughout the long history of the genre, travelogues have been popular with readers, particularly in certain periods, for instance toward the end of the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century. The various accounts of travels and experiences of mobility differ greatly with regard to style (from scientific reports to amusing anecdotes), form (from letters to diaries and longer narrative forms, with or without illustrations), and media (from written documents to blogs and films). Differences can also be identified with regard to their production (during the journey or afterwards, immediately following the trip or many years later) and to their reception (in short but regular form in journals or blogs, as a longer project, read in preparation for a journey or for entertainment, perceived as part of an author’s oeuvre or as a single text). The genre has evolved over time: as earlier travelogues had the added function of serving as guidebooks for other travellers, they had a more scientific and encyclopaedic character and focused on the collection of facts and knowledge. From about the second half of the eighteenth century (exceptions prove the rule), travellers and their impressions on the journey came to the fore. The increased possibility of travel due to improved infrastructure and lower costs from the late eighteenth century onward also enabled more members of the middle class to undertake journeys; among them were an increasing number of writers, who would then write about their experiences. The growing popularity of travel writing, together with the increased number of travel writing publications, meant that authors were increasingly compelled to develop their own individual approaches to the genre in terms of both form and content. The use of images is one way to render one’s travelogue unique and, at the same time, to underscore its subjecti- vity: the ubiquity of terms such as ‘pictures’, ‘sketches’, and ‘impressions’ in the titles mentioned above signals the particular, personal approach taken in such texts (even though the texts them- selves often contained images and views that would have been familiar to readers, included to satisfy their expectations). With that said, images can also be used to convey authenticity, and thus to claim objectivity — the idea that what I experienced was really as I described it — rather than individuality. The contributions to this issue aim to analyse the different forms and functions of images in travel writing and their relation to the text. In so doing, the supposed claims of the images