From pilgrim to savior: The Spanish traveller in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spain

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Spain was the destination of many foreign travellers. However, she did not produce many voyagers who ventured abroad. Those Spanish authors who did utilize the travel narrative usually did so within the confines of their native land. They were not interested in uncovering the exotic, but rather in rediscovering the intrahistoria of Spain. These authors chose to traverse all of Iberia in the hopes of explaining various periods of political turbulence in Spain\u27s history. Each author was representative of a specific socio-political context and thus wrote these travel narratives with a distinct underlying purpose. This thesis examines the historical context of each author and how it affected his travel narratives. This particular genre was employed in order to propagate the author\u27s creeds and beliefs about contemporary society. The authors studied in this thesis (Alarcón, Baroja, Goytisolo, Marañón, Buñuel, Ferres, López Salinas, and Carnicer) were united by the fundamental issue of “el problema de España.”\u27 This has always been a very salient theme in Spanish literature. It was not necessary to travel outside of Spain as there were so many dilemmas within the Iberian peninsula. As writers, these men were very much affected by the political situation of Spain. Writing was used as a method of protest to what each author perceived as a threat to their established political beliefs. The politics of these esteemed men ranged from ultraconservative to progressive to communist to anarchist, each which was reflected in their writings. Having examined all of these travel narratives, I can affirm that travel literature may be considered a distinct genre which can also be regarded as a subspecies of journalism. One can also distinguish between a travel book and travel diary. Travel writing borrows from many different categories such as the autobiography, journalism, memoirs, etc., thus creating an intelligible genre of its own