Literary Tourism and the British Isles

Literary Tourism and the British Isles: History, Imagination, and the Politics of Place explores literary tourism’s role in shaping how locations in the British-Irish Isles have been seen, historicized, and valued. Within its chapters, contributors approach these topics from vantage points such as feminism, cultural studies, geographic and mobilities paradigms, rural studies, ecosystems, philosophy of history, dark tourism, and marketing analyses. They examine guidebooks and travelogues; oral history, pseudo-history, and absent history; and literature that spans Renaissance drama to contemporary popular writers such as Dan Brown, Diana Gabaldon, and J.K. Rowling. Places discussed in the collection include “the West;” Wordsworth Country and Brontë Country; Stowe and Scotland; the Globe Theatre and its environs; Limehouse, Rosslyn Chapel, and the imaginary locations of the Harry Potter series. Taken as a whole, this collection illuminates some of the ways by which “the British Isles” have been created by literary and historical narratives, and, in turn, will continue to be seen as places of cultural importance by visitors, guidebooks, and site sponsors alike.

In an admirably wide-ranging journey through literary tourism in the British Isles—from the Renaissance to the present—the contributors to this book provide fascinating, important, and rich analyses of the construction of literary and historical narratives and imaginaries about places and spaces in Britain and Ireland., A fresh and richly diverse set of meditations upon the ways the locations and landscapes of the British Isles have been imagined for and by literary tourists. Essential reading on, in particular, the rhetoric of enchantment from the nineteenth century to the present., In essays investigating many attractions, this interdisciplinary collection advances studies of literary tourism by adding dimensions to the map of cultural commemoration in the British-Irish Isles.

LuAnn McCracken Fletcher is professor of English at Cedar Crest College.