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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Alison Booth (Professor of English, University of Virginia)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 16.80cm , Height: 2.40cm , Length: 24.00cm
Weight:   0.640kg
ISBN:  

9780198759096

ISBN 10:   0198759096
Pages:   346
Publication Date:   28 July 2016
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
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Table of Contents

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 Brontes 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

Reviews

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 * 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 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 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), and creator of the encyclopedic website The Dictionary of Victorian London (www.victorianlondon.org)., biography *

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

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 * 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 *

Author Information

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

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