Outdoor Literature

Outdoor literature is a literary genre about or involving the outdoors, encompassing subgenres such as exploration literature, adventure literature, nature writing, and the guidebook, an early example of which was Thomas West's 1778 guide to the Lake District. Its subjects include exploration, survival, sailing, hiking, mountaineering, whitewater boating, geocaching, and kayaking, as well as writing about nature and the environment more broadly. It overlaps considerably with travel literature, particularly in accounts of long journeys, though travel writing does not always concern the outdoors as such.