Cvetan Rakiovski
South-West University „Neofit Rilski“
Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria
https://doi.org/10.53656/bel2023-1-1
Abstract. The article is the first attempt to examine Vazov's travelogues from the point of view of literary theory. For this purpose, the territory of the scientific object is expanded – the analysis covers a large number of works from nearly 70 travelogues left by Vazov. The study has three main points: 1) the characteristics of the genre “travelogue”; 2) the relationship between fictional – credible; 3) the narrator in the structure of the travelogue.
The first problem is commented from the
position of the claim that travel writing is a hybrid, even borderline genre. It is this
role – to be on the border between literary and non-literary types of language – that
also causes the mixing of the veridical and the conventional. By this we mean to
say that the author's imagination is displaced, suppressed by the desire to tell factual stories.
Keywords: travel writing; narrative; genre; convention; reality; author
