Travel stories in Colombia, 1822-1837. Cochrane, Hamilton and Steuart

Abstract

Traditionally, historical discipline has valued travel literature as an empirical source, a pool of data to illustrate historical facts and processes. However, in recent decades from literary studies and poscolonial critical thinkers such as Edward W. Said and Mary Louise Pratt had drawn attention to these writings not only as autonomous literary and aesthetic artifacts, but also as an ideological construct of traveler writers about the visited places described in their works. In this article, the interstice of these disciplinary and theoretical perspectives presents three interpretative keys that allow tackling the travel stories by themselves, without neglecting their inclusion in a broader context, as the opening of the American territories emancipated from the Spanish crown and the colonial expansion of Great Britain in the nineteenth century.