The genre of travel literature encompasses outdoor literature, guide books, nature writing, and travel memoirs. One early travel memoirist in Western literature was Pausanias, a Greek geographer of the 2nd century AD. In the early modern period, James Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1786) helped shape travel memoir as a genre.
Travel literature became popular during the Song dynasty (960–1279) of medieval China. The genre was called 'travel record literature', and was often written in narrative, prose, essay and diary style. Travel literature authors such as Fan Chengda (1126–1193) and Xu Xiake (1587–1641) incorporated a wealth of geographical and topographical information into their writing, while the 'daytrip essay' Record of Stone Bell Mountain by the noted poet and statesman Su Shi (1037–1101) presented a philosophical and moral argument as its central purpose.

Travel Books