An outlook on approaches to the theory of travel writing in UK and us academia

The purpose of the preset article is to give an overview of the current trends in Anglophone travel writing from the Russian research perspective. Travel writing, being a complex and ambiguous phenomenon has too rarely been a subject of extensive theoretical research in Russia. At the very same time within the Anglophone research tradition there exists and flourishes a whole plethora of theoretical approaches to it, something quite unthinkable of in Russian research tradition, which relies heavily on the principle of interpreting the text within a theoretical framework, rather than constructing a theory around the text. Thus, we decided to give an overview of the current trends in travel writing research, which proved to be productive, widely supported by the academia on the global scale and often either omitted or misread by researchers in Russia. In order to achieve this aim we considered the ‘short comparative introduction’ to be the most appropriate from as, on the one hand, it allowed us to familiarize the potential reader with the names and publication we consider good starting points for a further independent research into the subject, and on the other - show how the theories which dominated literary studies in the Western world in the second half of the 20th century contributed to the development of travel writing theory. The structure and the nature of the data available, allowed us to make a very interesting observation, being that the gender aspect of travel is something often either overlooked or oversimplified in Russian research.