VERSATILE GENRES: TRAVEL WRITING AS ‘COMEDY’
VERSATILE GENRES: TRAVEL WRITING AS ‘COMEDY’

Summary/Abstract: Proposing a cursory critical slalom through various acceptations of “travel writing” and “comedy”, and also referring to such authors as William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Oscar Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, Dante, or Cervantes as exemplifications, our paper is suggestively a reading proposition meant to shed new light on conceptual intersections between the title keywords. With a structuralist-formalist mindset, the paper touches upon various critical perspectives mainly including the connection between a comical content and its possibilities of dramatic enactment, drama representations of “travel” and their comic purport, historical considerations, the relevance of the parodic, genre intersections revealed via the fluctuating poetics of the novel, aesthetic means of translating the social, cathartic echoes, and the relevance of the carnivalesque. Far from being exhaustive, our analysis still opens multiple research paths attempting a revaluation of two banal, quite forgotten genres relying on the rather clear distinction, in the world of letters, between “epic” and “dramatic”.

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