Travel Writing and Social Science on Contemporary Iberia

Travel writing is an important genre in terms of sales and in the production of representations of societies and cultures. Yet, many books under that label do not focus on a journey, so that this work starts by questioning the very definition of the genre, proposing an alternative designation, and performing a thorough revision of the literature (including approaches from social science, cultural studies, postcolonial studies and literature studies). In addition, as studies on travel writing usually mention quantities without making the quantification process explicit, this study takes an explicit quantified approach. In doing so, it adopts a social science perspective that allows it to produce a systematic description and analysis of the way contemporary Spain and Portugal are portrayed in travel writing vis-à-vis representations produced by social science. Based on this, it discusses general theoretical issues regarding the genre, and proposes that travel writers should be careful in the representations they produce given the ethics involved in representing places and people.