The Road to Oxiana. Robert Byron's Study Trip to Persia and Afghanistan

Essay from the year 2021 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Vienna, language: English, abstract: This essay deals with Byron's travelogue 'The Road to Oxiana'. In 1933, Robert Byron sets off for the Middle East to study the Central Asian forms of Islamic buildings and to document architectural masterpieces made of bricks and tiles. The route takes the 28-year-old Englishman by ship, car and horse from Italy and Cyprus via Palestine, Syria and Iraq to Persia and Afghanistan. The destination of his 11-month study trip is Oxiana, a predominantly Turkic-speaking area around the Amu Darya, known as the Oxus in ancient times. Based on the chronological entries of the travel diary which Byron kept between August 1933 and July 1934, 'The Road to Oxiana' (1937) is a literary account in diary form that combines different text types and tones into a multi-layered collage. In addition to narrative passages, it includes numerous political notes, comic dialogues, and sardonic comments, as well as a wealth of architectural, topographical, and ethnological descriptions in exceedingly poetic language. The travelogue has long since become a classic of modernist British literature. While Bruce Chatwin has referred to it as 'a work of genius', Paul Fussell has attached to it as much importance for the literary canon of the interwar period as James Joyce's novel Ulysses or T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land. Even though Robert Byron has sometimes been criticized for his orientalist ideas, he must still be considered a pioneer of contemporary travel literature.