The understanding of narratives is closely tied to the experience of travel. In narrative theory, the travel story features regularly as either the model narrative or the model for narrative. In Vladimir Propp's classic study of story grammar, for instance, the narrative functions are structured along a travel pattern between the hero's departure and return. In more recent narratology and literary history, and in certain interdisciplinary approaches to the study of narrative, the notion of travel may even function as a code or key revealing how the narrative works. In the history of the novel, travel writing has helped to shape the genre. Narratives of travel to exotic lands have informed the modern novel with detailed foreign settings and a sense of authenticity in viewpoint. Since the time of the Greek epics different types of journey 'the quest, the odyssey, and the adventure' have served as powerful masterplots in literary narratives. For instance, the chronotope of the road, and the metaphor of "the path of life" that it realizes, is a central feature in Mikhail Bakhtin's history of novelistic plot patterns and especially important for what Bakhtin calls the adventure. (Kai Mikkonen)