Paper Title
The Problematics of the Self and Other Depicted in the Language of Travel Narratives: Robinson Crusoe and other 18th Century British Travel Literature

Abstract
Travel narratives are written accounts of the personal experiences of the travelers. Travel and travel narratives are as ancient as the history of humankind’s existence, dating as far back as to cave paintings, where the early human would paint whatever he/she came across while traversing the land each day. In past few centuries, however, often these narratives depicted an idealized image of the narrator through the lens of the social norms and ideals of the narrator’s contemporary times, which reflected in the way the narrator/writer constructed his/her central character. This paper seeks to briefly explore the problematic of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ depicted in the language of the travel narratives, where the ‘other’ stands for the geographical region or culture which the narrators seek to explore with reference to their own ‘self’, which are their native region or culture. The principal question for this paper would be, to what an extent the language used in travel narratives could be biased while narrating about a foreign region, and how such a depiction leads towards the binary opposition of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, with reference to the 18th century travel literature and its inclinations.