Research project Travelers often want to describe their journeys in original ways, but travel writing is intertextual in its nature. Do the destinations of travellers influence how intertextual references are used? Are there gender differences in this regard?
While much travel literature is intertextual in nature in that the traveler is supposed to know, relate to, and to an extent position him/herself to previous writings concerning the encountered area, an added desire is to describe exclusive and ‘original’ experiences. These two objectives and the discrepancy between them will be analysed in the project Destinations, which is part of the research program Foreign North. Comparisons of texts by authors travelling in different geographical directions enable discussions about the shifting nature of the intertextual references, and make possible discussions about possible gender differences.