JTLS, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2026, pp. 19-36.
Print ISSN: 3135-6788; Online ISSN: 3135-6796
Journal homepage: https://www.tlsjournal.com
DOI：https://doi.org/10.64058/jtls260102rplcg
Rites de Passage: Literary Critical Genealogy and Cross-Disciplinary Interpretations of Travel Literature
Lijuan Huang and Tingcong Lin
Abstract: With the rise of cultural studies as the main trend in the 1980s, travel literature begins to receive its due attention from the western theorists and leaps from sub genre to the main literary terrain. Critics in postcolonialism, feminism, anthropology, geography, comparative literature all show their academic interest in the poetics and politics, literary aestheticism and cultural representation of travel literature. This essay regards the resurfacing of travel literature from the literary horizon as its embodiment of not only complex geopolitical and sociocultural elements, but also of its dynamism of being trans-racial, trans-linguistic and trans-disciplinary. Thus, it investigates the scope of travel literature, literary critical genealogies and cross-disciplinary interpretations in an attempt to draw a panorama of the study of travel literature theoretically for domestic scholars.
Keywords: travel literature; criticism of travel literature; postcolonial paradigm; cross-disciplinary interpretations
Author Biographies: Lijuan Huang (first author) is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University. She got her MA in 2003 from Sichuan International Studies University, PhD in 2011 from Beijing Foreign Studies University, Postdoc from 2012 to 2015 in Research Institute of Overseas Sinology (with its current name as International Institute of Chinese Culture) in Beijing Foreign Studies University. She had been a visiting scholar in the English Department of UC Berkeley of the US from 2009 to 2010, and awarded as Fulbright Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of Comparative Literature of Yale University from 2018 to 2019. Her research interest includes Western Critical Theory, Women Literature, Transcultural Writings and History of China and the West, etc. Her representative work, Narratives of China: A Transcultural Study of British Travel Literature in 20th Century (2012) is a pioneering one that has initiated a multidisciplinary comparative study of travel literature in China. Email: huanglijuan@bfsu.edu.cn.
Tingcong Lin (translator & corresponding author) is an associate professor of comparative literature at Jinan University, Guangzhou. He received his PhD from the University of Hong Kong. His research stands at the intersection of Victorian and postcolonial literature, historical and cultural geography, and heritage studies. His current project focuses on Western travel writing on China and Western images of China from the 19th century onwards. His research has been published in Victorian Literature and Culture, International Journal of Heritage Studies, International Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Urban History, Island Studies Journal, Neohelicon, and elsewhere. Email: lintingconglintc@gmail.com.
Received: 24 Jun 2026 / Revised: 01 Aug 2026 / Accepted: 15 Aug 2026 / Published online: 15 Sep 2026 / Print published: 15 Dec 2026. First published in Chinese as Huang, L. Rites de Passage: Literary Critical Genealogy and Cross-Disciplinary Interpretations of Travel Literature. Foreign Literature, 42(2), 134-144.
