"There is neither a past which would change the future nor there is a future which would change the past." If you are travelling to the past, you are basically travelling forward in time, to your past which in your future however, since this future is already happened in the past way back when you decided to time travel at the first place which indeed lead to this precise moment of you travelling to the past in the future, would have no effect, everything has happened; the past and the future has already happened. This can be visualize with a circle - there would be neither a starting point nor an ending point for that circle, yet it will NOT loop around.
One thing that most of us completely ignore about Time Travelling precisely about Time Travelling to the past is that "your time" would be ticking completely at a normal rate (for you) when you are travelling anywhere and anywhen in time. Time Travelling to the future, would make "your time" tick slow relative to others, that means time would "actually" slow down for you - your biological process would slow down and even the travelling of neurons in your brain would slow down, so does the process of thinking, so basically you wouldn't have any idea that time slowed down for you. However, people outside your frame of reference (who are stationary relative to you) can indeed notice the difference in your clock and their clocks. Time Travelling to the past. This is a highly mis-conceptualized approach that we always think about WITHOUT considering the basic factors into account. We just believe that it would be possible to travel to the past and interact with the past, as precisely shown in MANY science fictions, however, that is just the human understanding to make the complex impossible thing possible ANYHOW. Anyways, we never consider what would happen to us "biologically" when we travel to the past? Do we age or "de-age"? If you are travelling to the past, you would still travel "forward" in time, as you would age however, you will be travelling to the past, which is now in "your future" and this future has already happened in the past, so basically it would be the past in the future that was in the past but now is in the future. You would NOT change anything in the future-past but you would create it as it suppose to be.
Well, Japanese literature of the 9-th and 10-th centuries AD has two interesting instances of travel. In the legend of the fisherman Urashima Taro, the character goes to the palace at the bottom of the sea, where time flows more slowly than on earth. When he returns to his village several hundred years had passed and he ages quickly and dies.
The other story, of Kaguya Hime, speaks of a beautiful girl who comes from the Moon onto the family of an old couple. She grows to be very beautiful but when she has many suitors time comes for her to return to the Moon, leaving everyone bereaved. Not so much time travel as other dimensional travel, but the two stories are interesting and not found in other literatures.
Legends / myths about people who fell asleep and their awakening, like Septem dormientes, Holy Youths “Seven Sleepers” of Ephesus, أصحاب الكهف (option: meeting and talking with dead relatives in their graves, where time passes more slowly, and returning to their village) after the N number of years are known in many cultures. I suspect that their genesis is connected with some forgotten shamanic practices (these are my guesses, nothing more).
The physical (body) transfer often turns out to be a punishment (severing ties with relatives, contemporaries; a similar motif ("falling out of one's time") is in St. Lem's SciFi novel - Powrót z gwiazd, 1961).
From the chronotope's point of view, nothing changes. Life at point A and at point B are the same.
Another variant of the chronotope in prophecies is visions of pictures of the future, usually eschatological pictures of the End of Time. Life at point B is radically different from life at point A and is its completion (not development, namely death, summing up). The purpose is a warning to change the present.
SciFi chrono-journeys, starting with "L'an 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais" (1771), sets the tradition of prognosis (in the spirit of: "If we'll implement these reforms, the results will be as follows"). It is well known that Francis Bacon came closest to this technique in "New Atlantis" (1626; NB on the title of the first edition of A VVork vnfinished). The publication history, I guess, shows how much (in the opinion of the author and publishers) this innovative literary form was difficult for readers of that generation to comprehend.
So, this topic is extremely interesting, promising and fruitful for the studies of bibliopsychology (as well as child psychology).
A characteristic detail: in Pushkin's time (the generation of the fathers of Leo Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev), a novel, story, chapter or stanza in a poem, which described a "journey into the future", in Russian literature we can find every year. I think that the enlightened plurilingual Russian youth of the early 19th century were influenced by Julius von Foss's futurist novel "Ini. A novel from the twenty-first century" (1810). But I met an experience for such a technique in Radishchev's (the literary experimenter) manuscripts on the eve of the 1790s
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