Latin american travel accounts typology: definitions and development

Abstract

Although travel accounts are one of literary genres with more tradition in literature, their poetic was far beyond of being well defined. Thanks to Alburquerque and Carrizo Rueda researches, among others, this situation has radically changed in the Hispanic world. From their definitions of travel accounts, that allow selecting texts by narratological, rhetoric and cultural criteria, not only focusing on the subject, as traditionally was done, this work explores the genre development in Latin American literature since Independence with the purpose of explaining its chronological development. It also tries to describe the different formal patterns in which the genre has been practiced, all of which has also suffered its own evolution. The suggested typology is formed by models that can be extrapolated to other literatures.