| Summary: | Travel texts have a long history and modern travelogues constitute a considerable part of contemporary popular fiction. Having appeared in ancient times the genre has been developing and transforming due to the life and cultural changes up to nowadays. Tim Youngs (2013) considers it to be the most socially important of all literary genres, as it records a temporal and spatial progress of any society. Its strong position today can also be explained by the processes of globalization of the world, which lead to new developments in the world travel literature. Throughout centuries travelogue has acquired new forms, changed in quality, its language has changed significantly and today there is hardly any place in the world, which has never been a subject of some travel text. Thus, its heterogeneous character also becomes quite obvious, as readers and scholars are dealing not just with various types of travelogues, but also the question of its belonging to fiction or non-fiction arises. Peter Hulme and Youngs (2002) state that, as a field of scholarly research, the critical attention to travel writing is relatively young. However, a big number of scholars and travel critics today, especially American, such as Jonathan Raban, Debbie Lisle, Mary Baine Campbell, Carl Thompson, Youngs and many others, refer to the genre of travelogue, study and analyse it, trying to distinguish some common features of travel texts and perhaps to answer the questions of whether travelogue is a literary genre and whether it is fiction or just popular scientific prose. The aim of the present article is to consider the genre of travelogue and the diversity of its forms, starting with terminological peculiarities, which appear in designating travel texts in English, Latvian, and Russian, and following with a number of arguments on its heterogeneous character.
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