Worldwide Travel in World Literature: From the Plot of the Test to the Metaphor of Knowledge

The worldwide travel as a literary plot has undergone a complex evolution: from a documentary chronicle of real expeditions to a universal metaphor of the life path, the knowledge of the world, and oneself. In world literature, it serves not just as an exotic backdrop, but as a structuring principle, a laboratory for testing the hero, ideas, and social norms.

1. The Phase of Documentalism and Philosophical Reflection (XVI–XVIII centuries).

The first texts were actually reports, but already carried a powerful philosophical charge.

Antonio Pigafetta, "The Voyage of Magellan" (approx. 1525): The chronicle of the first worldwide voyage (1519-1522) is not just a description of the route, but a text of confrontation. For the first time, an European details the total alienness of foreign worlds (Patagonia, the Philippines). Travel here is an act of heroic and sacrificial overcoming of the known boundaries, where success (the return of one ship out of five) is akin to a miracle.

"Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift (1726): Although Lemuel Gulliver does not undertake a technically worldwide journey, his four voyages to unknown lands follow the same logic of comparative anthropological research. Swift uses the form of travel for sharp satire on European civilization, politics, and human nature. Each land is a "mirror-monstrous," exaggerating vices or virtues. The worldwide journey (as a series of radically different worlds) becomes a method of estrangement and criticism.

2. Romanticism and Science Fiction: Travel as an Internal Quest and Utopia (XIX century).

In the XIX century, the worldwide plot is romanticized and complicated.

"The Children of Captain Grant" (1868) and "Around the World in 80 Days" (1872) by Jules Verne. Verne creates two principal models. "The Children of Captain Grant" is a quest journey where the goal (searching for the father) justifies the movement along the route. Geography becomes a giant puzzle that needs to be assembled. In "80 Days," travel is a sporting bet, a challenge to time and space. Phileas Fogg moves not for knowledge, but for victory over abstraction — meridians and clocks. His journey is cyclic and mechanistic, and the main discovery (winning a day) — an ironic victory of human calculation over matter. Here, the worldwide journey becomes an intellectual game and a demonstration of the triumph of technology (steamship, railway).

"Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville (1851). The voyage of the Pequod is not a worldwide journey in the purest sense, but a metaphysical journey into the depths of nature and madness. The hunt for the White Whale turns the oceanic expanses into a battlefield of confrontation between man and the transcendent. The route is structured around pursuit, and the geographical worldwide nature highlights the cosmic scale of the tragedy of Ahab.

Interesting fact: Jules Verne's novel "Around the World in 80 Days" was an interactive media event. The newspaper "Le Temps," where it was published in serial form, organized virtual bets for readers on the outcome of Fogg's journey. This is one of the first cases where a literary worldwide journey became a mass gaming and speculative phenomenon.

3. The XX century: Deconstruction of heroism and travel into the depths of consciousness.

Modernism and postmodernism question the very idea of heroic conquest of space.

"Around the World on the Sailing Yacht 'Spray'" by Joshua Slocum (1900). This is a non-fiction, but extremely literary autobiography of the first solo worldwide voyage. The text marks a transition: travel becomes not a collective enterprise, but an individual challenge, a dialogue of a lone person with the ocean and himself. This is a precursor to survival literature and the search for the limits of personal capabilities.

"Journey to the End of the Night" by Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1932). Although the action of the novel is not global, its metaphorical title and structure (a series of escapes, movements, hospitals) create the feeling of a worldwide journey through hell of modern civilization. This is an inversion of the idea — travel does not open the world, but reveals its rot, and the hero is not a researcher, but a fugitive.

"The Salmon of Doubt" by Douglas Adams (posthumous collection) and his idea. Adams noted with irony that the main problem of space is that it is "too vast." His humorous view (such as in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy") desacralizes the motif of cosmic "world tours," turning them into an absurd bureaucratic routine.

4. Contemporary literature: ecology, globalization, and the search for identity.

In the literature of the XXI century, the worldwide travel is interpreted through the lens of ecological disasters, globalization, and the crisis of identity.

"Conquest of the South Pole" and other texts about modern extreme travels. Books by solo travelers (for example, about worldwide sailing or crossing the Arctic) continue the line of Slocum, but add an ecological subtext — observation of the changing planet.