Monomyth: The Subjectivity of Travel Narratives

Chinese travel narrative has a long history and can be traced back to "Quafoo Chasing after the Sun"-- a myth recorded in The Classics of Mountains and Seas (in Pre-Qin period). Travel writings, which derived from travel narrative, reflect people's curiosity and adventure to the unknown world. However, as the concept of literary genre remained underdeveloped and the concept of modern biography has not yet been introduced, the significance of travel writing as a separate genre has not been established, let alone its mingling status with travel literature and landscape literature. Moreover, in the previous studies, the literariness and knowledge of humanity, geography and history in travels have been discussed, while its core travel narrative strategy has not been illustrated under the framework of biography.
This paper refers to Casey Blanton's adoption of "monomyth", the mythological theory by Joseph Campbell, to explore the development of the subject characteristics in Chinese travel narratives. By examining the long history of Chinese literature from the perspectives of travel writings, we can find a series of research objects conforming to the "monomyth" model. Through exploring into these works that can be clearly discussed as travel narrative, we can have a glimpse of the traveling narrative tradition in the history of Chinese literature.