This original, witty, illustrated study offers the first analytical history of the rise and development of literary tourism in nineteenth-century Britain, associated with authors from Shakespeare, Gray, Keats, Burns and Scott, the Brontë sisters, and Thomas Hardy. Invaluable for the student of travel and literature of the nineteenth century.
"A rare treat: a time travel tale that brings something new to the subgenre. . ..A wry social commentary and an uneasy tale of escalating paranoia." Guardian THE FUTURE IS ALREADY WRITTEN. THE FUTURE HAS ALREADY HAPPENED. "Welcome to the 21st Century. Please don't feed the natives. . ..Echoes of Bradbury and Orwell, in the service of a crackerjack conspiracy plot; a seductively intriguing work of speculative fiction." Kirkus TIME TRAVEL IS CONFUSING. "Leaps of time, identity, and chronology create a dark, chillingly claustrophobic atmosphere." Publishers Weekly PROCEED WITH CAUTION. WHO WILL SOLVE THE PUZZLE OF THE TOURIST?
In this era of advanced technology keeping students' attention often becomes difficult. Teachers need to find new ways to create interest. In writing classes, choosing a topic that involves students is a priority. A new genre, Tourism Writing, is an innovative and effective means of teaching students composition. It can fill this need. Tourism Writing focuses on a particular place or event, provides photos and information on nearby points of interest, and directly invites visitors. This book provides an understanding of how Tourism Writing benefits people in all areas of life. This transfers to classroom assignments when students are asked to write a poem in this genre and they are given lists of possible topics, but they also have the option to choose their own place or event. It becomes a learning experience as many are amazed at their ability to write a poem and intrigued by the history they learn while researching and they treasure their photos used for illustration. Such poems were entered in the annual Poetry Writing Contest at Faulkner University. In the process, students? communication and research skills were enhanced. They learned the history of their own area. This hands-on process is rewarding to teach. The plan is to add prose assignments on Tourism Writing to the classroom curriculum in the future. The possibilities for Tourism Writing are widespread.
This timely and insightful book critically reviews the synergistic relationship between books, literary culture, and the practices of tourism. The volume sets literary fiction tourism within its historical, theoretical, and managerial context and explores the current provision of literary tourism sites and experiences. It focuses on literary fiction and the interplay between imaginative worlds, literary reputation, and tourism. The volume explores a variety of literary tourism forms in a global context such as biographical sites, imaginative sites, literary trails, and book towns, identifying the challenges associated with interpreting and managing them for visitors. Current international case studies allow readers to understand this most ancient of touristic activity within its contemporary context. This book offers new insight into the diversity of the literary tourism landscape, the range of experiences and visitors and the variety of interpretive responses that may be appropriate. The relationship between literary fiction and other forms of media such as film and digital culture are also explored. International in scope, this volume will be of interest to students of tourism, heritage studies, cultural studies, and media studies, as well those interested in literary tourism more specifically.
Winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction In this new, expanded edition of her prize-winning collection, which includes a reading group guide, Midge Raymond stretches the boundaries of place as she explores the indelible imprint of home upon the self and the ways in which new frontiers both defy and confirm who we are. The characters who inhabit these stories travel for business or for pleasure, sometimes out of duty and sometimes in search of freedom, and each encounters the unexpected. From a biologist navigating the stark, icy moonscape of Antarctica to a businesswoman seeking refuge in the lonely islands of the South Pacific, the characters in these stories abandon their native landscapes—only to find that, once separated from the ordinary, they must confront new interpretations of whom they really are, and who they’re meant to be.
Inspired Traveller’s Guides: Literary Places takes you on an enlightening journey through the key locations of literature’s best and brightest authors, movements, and moments—brought to life through comprehensively researched text and stunning hand-drawn artwork. Travel journalist Sarah Baxter provides comprehensive and atmospheric outlines of the history and culture of 25 literary places around the globe, as well as how they intersect with the lives of the authors and the works that make them significant. Full-page color illustrations instantly transport you to each location. You’ll find that these places are not just backdrops to the tales told, but characters in their own right. Travel to the sun-scorched plains of Don Quixote’s La Mancha, roam the wild Yorkshire moors with Cathy and Heathcliff, or view Central Park through the eyes of J.D. Salinger’s antihero. Explore the lush and languid backwaters of Arundhati Roy’s Kerala, the imposing precipice of Joan Lindsay’s Hanging Rock, and the labyrinthine streets and sewers of Victor Hugo’s Paris. Delve into this book to discover some of the world’s most fascinating literary places and the novels that celebrate them.
This stunning “dystopian feminist eco-thriller” from an award-winning South Korean author “takes on climate change, sexual assault, greed, and dark tourism” (Ms. Magazine). Welcome to the desert island of Mui, where a paid vacation to paradise is nothing short of a disaster in this “mordantly witty novel [that] reads like a highly literary, ultra–incisive thriller” (Refinery29). Jungle is a cutting–edge travel agency specializing in tourism to destinations devastated by disaster and climate change. And until she found herself at the mercy of a predatory colleague, Yona was one of their top representatives. Now on the verge of losing her job, she’s given a proposition: take a paid “vacation” to the desert island of Mui and pose as a tourist to assess the company’s least profitable holiday. When she uncovers a plan to fabricate an extravagant catastrophe, she must choose: prioritize the callous company to whom she’s dedicated her life, or embrace a fresh start in a powerful new position? An eco–thriller with a fierce feminist sensibility, The Disaster Tourist introduces a fresh new voice to the United States that engages with the global dialogue around climate activism, dark tourism, and the #MeToo movement.
A century after Samuel Clemens’s death, Mark Twain thrives—his recently released autobiography topped bestseller lists. One way fans still celebrate the first true American writer and his work is by visiting any number of Mark Twain destinations. They believe they can learn something unique by visiting the places where he lived. Mark Twain’s Homes and Literary Tourism untangles the complicated ways that Clemens’s houses, now museums, have come to tell the stories that they do about Twain and, in the process, reminds us that the sites themselves are the products of multiple agendas and, in some cases, unpleasant histories. Hilary Iris Lowe leads us through four Twain homes, beginning at the beginning—Florida, Missouri, where Clemens was born. Today the site is simply a concrete pedestal missing its bust, a plaque, and an otherwise-empty field. Though the original cabin where he was born likely no longer exists, Lowe treats us to an overview of the history of the area and the state park challenged with somehow marking this site. Next, we travel with Lowe to Hannibal, Missouri, Clemens’s childhood home, which he saw become a tourist destination in his own lifetime. Today mannequins remind visitors of the man that the boy who lived there became and the literature that grew out of his experiences in the house and little town on the Mississippi. Hartford, Connecticut, boasts one of Clemens’s only surviving adulthood homes, the house where he spent his most productive years. Lowe describes the house’s construction, its sale when the high cost of living led the family to seek residence abroad, and its transformation into the museum. Lastly, we travel to Elmira, New York, where Clemens spent many summers with his family at Quarry Farm. His study is the only room at this destination open to the public, and yet, tourists follow in the footsteps of literary pilgrim Rudyard Kipling to see this small space. Literary historic sites pin their authority on the promise of exclusive insight into authors and texts through firsthand experience. As tempting as it is to accept the authenticity of Clemens’s homes, Mark Twain’s Homes and Literary Tourism argues that house museums are not reliable critical texts but are instead carefully constructed spaces designed to satisfy visitors. This volume shows us how these houses’ portrayals of Clemens change frequently to accommodate and shape our own expectations of the author and his work.
Gathers travel writings by Margaret Atwood, Peter Benchley, Heinrich Boll, Bruce Chatwin, Gerald Durrell, Graham Greene, Peter Matthiessen, John McPhee, and Paul Theroux
There are many ways to show our devotion to an author besides reading his or her works. Graves make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular are writers' house museums. What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author? We may go in search of the point of inspiration, eager to stand on the very spot where our favorite literary characters first came to life—and find ourselves instead in the house where the author himself was conceived, or where she drew her last breath. Perhaps it is a place through which our writer passed only briefly, or maybe it really was a longtime home—now thoroughly remade as a decorator's show-house. In A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses Anne Trubek takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of a goodly number of house museums across the nation. In Key West she visits the shamelessly ersatz shrine to a hard-living Ernest Hemingway, while meditating on his lost Cuban farm and the sterile Idaho house in which he committed suicide. In Hannibal, Missouri, she walks the fuzzy line between fact and fiction, as she visits the home of the young Samuel Clemens—and the purported haunts of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Injun' Joe. She hits literary pay-dirt in Concord, Massachusetts, the nineteenth-century mecca that gave home to Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau—and yet could not accommodate a surprisingly complex Louisa May Alcott. She takes us along the trail of residences that Edgar Allan Poe left behind in the wake of his many failures and to the burned-out shell of a California house with which Jack London staked his claim on posterity. In Dayton, Ohio, a charismatic guide brings Paul Laurence Dunbar to compelling life for those few visitors willing to listen; in Cleveland, Trubek finds a moving remembrance of Charles Chesnutt in a house that no longer stands. Why is it that we visit writers' houses? Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Anne Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds in each some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America.