From Richard Eden to Everything Everywhere: Discourses of travel writing from early modern editors to the contemporary travel blog

Travel blogs have become an important new form of travel writing over the last decade with some achieving more than a million page views per month, and their authors becoming top-ranking social influencers. The ability to load material to web pages and reach readers directly suggests that editors are superfluous in this form of travel writing. However, as this article shows, not only do bloggers adopt many of the roles traditionally associated with editors, they use very similar discourses to the editors of some of the earliest collections of travel writing. This paper explores both the continuities and differences in these discourses showing both their indebtedness, whether conscious or not, to early editors and the ways in which these discourses have changed in contemporary times to reflect the modern world of travel writing.