EDITORIAL

Abstract

Travel is a journey on purpose. It is naturally associated with the spirit of adventure and a philosophical quest for knowledge with which mankind has engaged itself as meaning-making creatures since time immemorial. Though Travel literature and its motifs could not receive due attention of critics in the past, it has occupied prime importance in the post colonial discourse. Travel writings of arechetypal significance such as Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Spenser’s Faerie Queene and even Travelogues of the historians, which were earlier read as ’innocent’ readings of the symbolic or allegorical or physical journeys of an individual or the whole manfolk in search of adventure and knowledge have been revisited with Post-modernist insights and have opened up new vistas of travel, travel writers and travel literature. It has redefined the identity and motifs of travel writing in terms of displacement, location /position, stereotyping, Othering, negation and negotiation, ambivalence, and politics of representation.