Travel Writing on the Edge: An Intermedial Approach to Travel Books and Travel Blogs

After discussing the limits and potentialities of the definitions of travel writing proposed by Paul Fussell (1980). Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan (1998) and Jan Borm (2004), the article presents a characterization of travel writing both as a genre with a precise rhetorical status, as well as a praxis of knoivledge, which derives from the interplay between travelling and writing. Building on this, a comparison between two Italian travel books and two Italian travel blogs about China is proposed. Specifically, by considering these texts as “intermedial transpositions” (Wolf 2008) that realize the same generic and epistemological matrix (i.e. travel writing), a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) is conducted in order to assess: 1) how the book and the blog, as different medial formats, interpret the rhetorical features of the travel writing genre: and 2) to what extent the gnoseological and cross-cultural potentials of travel writing, as a praxis of knowledge, is affected by the process of transposition.