An increasingly popular genre - addressing issues of empire, colonialism, post-colonialism, globalization, gender and politics - travel writing offers the reader a movement between the familiar and the unknown. In this volume, Carl Thompson:introduces the genre, outlining competing definitions and key debates provides a broad historical survey from the medieval period to the present dayexplores the autobiographical dimensions of the formlooks at both men and women's travel writing, surveying ...

Tristes Tropiques begins with the line 'I hate travelling and explorers', yet during his life Claude Levi-Strauss travelled from wartime France to the Amazon basin and the dense upland jungles of Brazil, where he found 'human society reduced to its most basic expression'. His account of the people he encountered changed the field of anthropology, transforming Western notions of 'primitive' man. Tristes Tropiques is a major work of art as well as of scholarship.

It is a memoir of exquisite bea...