A Portrait of Sean O’Faolain as a Travel Writer

Despite being regarded as one of Ireland’s foremost short-story writers, O’Faolain’s literary output also encompasses travelogues, although this literary genre is sometimes considered as a minor phase in his writing career. His travel books include An Irish Journey, A Summer in Italy, An Autumn in Italy, and the article “In Search of Sardinia”, written for the American magazine Holiday. This essay analyses the characteristic traits of his travel writing, namely the constant presence of characters, delineated through the deliberate and sophisticated dialogic form, the setting of the narrated stories, and the personal reflections. His way of narrating and describing the places he visited, between wonder and reality, with disenchantment and irony, makes his travel books a personal form of narrative, thanks to the rich vocabulary due to the artistic maturity, intertextuality, and internationalization of his work.