Travel Literature

Many people have connected Gulliver´s Travels with the Travel Literature of the time. It makes all the sense in the world, because in each book the main character, Gulliver, travels from one place to another. This method to present the story might have been influenced by the amount of travel literature that was written during the century.
It is said, that Jonathan Swift read a lot of travel literature; a proof of it is in a letter written by him to his friend Vanessa where he says “I know not how many diverting Books of History and Travels.” A place where he would read travel literature books was Moor Park. He owned several books many travel books by Francois Bernier, Peter Martyr, Thomas Herbert, Joseph Andrews and the great collections of Hakluyt and Purchas.
The beginning of travel literature can be considered to be at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, with the travelogues of Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Batutta. Travel literature is present from a very early stage in the medieval Arabic literature. Also, Marco Polo´s travels in the thirteenth century in the Western World.
    However, the most important distinction is factional or fictional travel literature. Some fictional works are based on real journeys, like Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, or Homer´s Odyssey. Others are more fictional narratives with real aspects, like Divine Comedy, by Dante, or our satirical piece Gulliver´s Travels.
    In a nutshell, we can see how this great writer not only influenced the literature of his time with this satirical work, but how he was also influenced by many other writers of the past, and others more recent to his time. 



Sources: 
http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4211/1/WRAP_THESIS_Jones_1987.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travel_literature