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.
Keywords
British Isle Realist Text Natural Presence Literary Canon Literary TourismPreview
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Notes
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