The first part of the article examines the context of the renewal of the study of travel literature, which started in the mid 1970s, in order to better understand its intellectual objectives and critical parameters. The context of decolonization thus created certain parallels between the criticism of colonialism and the literary criticism of travel literature. The need for assessing the legacy of colonialism also motivates the study of its advent in Early Modern texts. The insistence placed upon origins, and upon first contact, in turn, is one of the many places where the study of travel narratives interacts with the discipline of anthropology. The second part of the article is about the ambivalence involving, on one hand, the advent of research on travel literature, and on the other, its difficulties in precisely defining its object, or its refusal to do so. The definition of the object appears to be less crucial than its rehabilitation or its historicization. The third part of the article presents a selection of critical discourses, questionings, and stakes, linked to travel literature: (1) poetics, (2) historical approaches, from new historicism to the history of the book, (3) alterity and its phenomenological or anthropological study, (4) text and image, (5) the reception of travel narratives, such as its reprocessing by philosophical discourse, (6) colonial discourse and postcolonial theories, (6) world history.