Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers' Shrines and Countries

by Alison Booth

Overview

This is the first full-length study of literary tourism in North America as well as Britain, and a unique exploration of popular response to writers, literary house museums, and the landscapes or "countries " associated with their lives and works. An interdisciplinary study ranging from 1820-1940, Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers' Shrines and Countries unites museum and tourism studies, book history, narrative theory, theories of gender, space, and things, and other approaches to depict and interpret the haunting experiences of exhibited houses and the curious history of topo-biographical writing about famous authors. In illustrated chapters that blend Victorian and recent first-person encounters that range from literary shrines and plaques to guidebooks, memoirs, portraits, and monuments, Alison Booth discusses pilgrims such as William and Mary Howitt, Anna Maria and Samuel Hall, and Elbert Hubbard, and magnetic hosts and guests as Washington Irving, Wordsworth, Martineau, Longfellow, Hawthorne, James, and Dickens. Virginia Woolf's feminist response to homes and haunts shapes a chapter on Mary Russell Mitford, Gaskell, and the Brontës, and another on the Carlyles' house and Monk's House. Booth rediscovers collections of personalities, haunted shrines, and imaginative re-enactments that have been submerged by a century of academic literary criticism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191076893
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	09/08/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	300
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Alison Booth is Professor of English and Academic Director, Scholars Lab, at the University of Virginia

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
1. Revisiting Literary Shrines: Tours, Texts, Houses, and Things
2. Verifying Pilgrimage: Nonfiction Collections Show You the Way
3. Ladies with Pets and Flowers; with Graveyards and Windswept Moors
4. Moving into Eponymous Zones: Tenants in Author Country
5. The Sage, His Wife, the Maid, and Her Lover: Reconstructing a Literary House Museum with Virginia Woolf
6. Haunting Dickens World: To Be Continued
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

"Booth proves herself an insightful and erudite travelling companion for her readers. The sum total of her expeditions is a distinctive, perceptive, and fascinating book-a valuable contribution to a burgeoning field of interdisciplinary study." — Lee Jackson, Author of Walking Dickens' London (Shire Publications, 2012), Dirty Old London (Yale UP, 2014), and Palaces of Pleasure (Yale UP, 2019)

"Booth's journeys to the homes and haunts of nineteenth-century authors illuminate the significance of an often over-looked and undervalued kinetic mode of literary reception that continues to impact literary studies in the twenty-first century, and in the process unseats simplistic distinctions between academic and amateur engagement with authors in place." — Amber Pouliot, Woolf Studies Annual

"Booth tracks the growth of literary tourism as a middle-class, aspirational form of travel, and teases out its relationship to nationalism and regionalism as well as its reliance on nineteenth-century ideologies of genius, domesticity, and privacy." — Andrea Henderson, Studies in English Literature

"Booth's detailed description and reappraisal of the neglected genre is original ... Written for a broad audience in a communal voice, with engaging narration that mixes intimacy and distance, topo-biography is proposed, half-seriously, as a model for narrowing the gap between highbrow and middlebrow." —Samantha Matthews, Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher