Abstract
This is a book about literary tourism as it develops over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is about the ways in which reading, at least for a noticeable and mainstream category of literature’s consumers, becomes progressively and differentially locked to place, over a period defined by the works of Thomas Gray and Jean-Jacques Rousseau at one end and those of Thomas Hardy at the other. This period saw the practice of visiting places associated with particular books in order to savour text, place and their interrelations grow into a commercially significant phenomenon, witnessing the rise of William Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon, Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford, Robert Burns’s Alloway and the Brontë sisters’ Haworth, amongst other flourishing sites of native literary pilgrimage.
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Notes
Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (London, 1962).
John Masefield, The Box of Delights (London, 1935).
Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill (London, 1906), 12–13.
Tourist leaflet ‘Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons in the Lake District’, The (Arthur Ransome Society, 2003).
Arthur Ransome, Secret Water (London, 1939).
On du Maurier and tourism, and especially on how the Brontë-like structures of Rebecca solicit a certain gothic form of literary pilgrimage, see Nicola J. Watson, ‘Rebecca’, The Popular and the Canonical: Debating Twentieth-Century Literature, 1940–2000, ed. David Johnson (London and New York, 2005), 13–56, especially 51–4.
See Chapter 8, so titled, in William Sharp, Literary Geography (London, 1904). For the curious, it is improbably located simultaneously in Wales and East Anglia, and reflects the popularity of Walter Theodore Watts-Dutton’s novel Aylwin (1898).
James Buzard, The Beaten Track (Oxford, 1993).
H. Berghoff, Barbara Korte, Ralf Schneider, and Christopher Harvie, The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600–2000 (Basingstoke, 2002).
Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley, 1998).
John Urry, Consuming Places (London, 1995).
Péter Dâvidhâzi’s, The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare (Basingstoke, 1998).
Douglas Lanier’s, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford, 2002).
Stephen Gill’s, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford, 2001).
Patsy Stoneman’s, Brontë Transformations (Hemel Hempstead, 1996).
Literature audits Cults, eds, Péter Dávidházi and Karafiáth,(Budapest, 1994).
‘Shakespeare on the tourist trail’ in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare in Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge, 2007).
Barbara Johnson, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Jacques Derrida, Disseminations, tr. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, 1981), xiii–xiv.
Susan Coolidge, What Katy Did Next (1886; Hertfordshire, 1995), 76–7.
R.D. Blackmore, Lorna Doone (1869; Doone-Land Edition, 1908), preface.
Kate Marsh, ed., Writers and their Houses: A Guide to the Writers’ Houses of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Essays by Modern Writers (London, 1993), xi. For another excellent recent contribution to this genre, see Christina Hardyment, Literary Trails: British Writers in their Landscapes (London, 2000).
Parts of Chapter 4 of this study were first presented at this conference as ‘Doing Rousseau’, which was published on the Tourism and Literature: Travel, Imagination and Myth CD-Rom, eds, Mike Robinson and David Picard (Sheffield, 2004).
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© 2006 Nicola J. Watson
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Watson, N.J. (2006). Introduction. In: The Literary Tourist. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584563_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584563_1
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