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.
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.
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1: Tours, Texts, Houses, and Things
English Professors on Pilgrimage
Pilgrimage and Tourism
A Grammar of Touristic Motives
Making a Tour and Writing It: Homes and Haunts Narratives
Country Houses, Gothic, and Tourism with Jane Austen
Literary Biography, Museums, and the Small Eponymous Collection
The Blue Plaque Scheme
Author Country
Reading the Haunted Spaces of Museums
Things
2: Verifying Pilgrimage
Voice, Rhetoric, and the Nonfiction of Prosopography
Washington Irving as Belated Pilgrim
Irving on Avon
The English Deer-Slayer: Manly Romance
William Howitt Arrives at Homes and Haunts
Anna Maria Hall and S. C. Hall: A Collaboration
Advertising Elbert Hubbard
3: Ladies with Pets and Flowers; with Graveyards and Windswept
Moors
En Route to Our Village
Women, Men, and Pets in a Literary Gallery
The Pilgrimage to Three Mile Cross
Elizabeth Gaskell in Knutsford and Plymouth Grove
In Haworth with the Brontës
4: Tenants in Author Country
Wordsworthshire: Howitt, Martineau, and the Turf of the Lakes
Longfellow in National Headquarters
Park Service
A Concord Encounter
Hawthorne's (Briefly) Home
James in and around Shakespearean Homes
A "Little" Past on the Hudson River
Haunting Lamb House
5: The Sage, his Wife, the Maid, and her Lover: Reconstructing a
Literary House Museum with Virginia Woolf
Carlyle Productions: Portraits of Home Life
Posthumous No. 24 Cheyne Row
Virginia Woolf and Haunting Memorial Houses
Little Journeys to Chelsea, Bloomsbury, and Monk's House
6: Haunting Dickens World: To Be Continued
Bibliography
Index
Alison Booth is Professor of English and Academic Director, Scholars Lab, at the University of Virginia
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*
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