Cmglee London Kings Cross Platform 9 3 4

Literary tourism is a type of

cultural tourism Cultural tourism is a type of tourism activity in which the visitor's essential motivation is to learn, discover, experience and consume the tangible and intangible cultural attractions/products in a tourism destination. These attractions/produ ...

that deals with places and events from literary texts as well as the lives of their authors. This could include visiting particular place associated with a novel or a novelist, such as a

writer's home Writers' homes (sometimes writer's, author's or literary houses) are locations where writers lived. Frequently, these homes are preserved as historic house museums and literary tourism destinations, called writer's home museums, especially when t ...

, or grave site, following routes taken by a fictional characters, visiting places mentioned in poems, as well as visiting museums dedicated to specific writers, works, regional literatures, and

literary genres A literary genre is a category of literature. Genres may be determined by literary technique, setting tone, tone, Content (media), content, or length (especially for fiction). They generally move from more abstract, encompassing classes, which a ...

Characteristics

William Shakespeares birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon 26l2007

Some scholars regard literary tourism as a contemporary type of secular

pilgrimage A pilgrimage is a journey, often into an unknown or foreign place, where a person goes in search of new or expanded meaning about their self, others, nature, or a higher good, through the experience. It can lead to a personal transformation, aft ...

. There are also long-distance walking routes associated with writers, such as the

Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Word ...

Way. Literary tourists are specifically interested in how places have influenced writing and at the same time how writing has created place. In order to become a literary tourist you need only book-love and an inquisitive mindset; however, there are literary guides, literary maps, and literary tours to help you on your way. There are also many museums associated with writers, and these are usually housed in buildings associated with a writer's birth or literary career, such as their

home A home, or domicile, is a space used as a permanent or semi-permanent residence for one or many humans, and sometimes various companion animals. It is a fully or semi sheltered space and can have both interior and exterior aspects to it. H ...

Tourism fiction

While most literary tourism is focused on famous works, more modern works that are written to specifically promote tourism are called tourism fiction. Modern tourism fiction can include travel guides within the story showing readers how to visit the real places in the fictional tales. With recent technological advances in publishing, digital tourism fiction books can even allow literary tourists to follow direct links to tourism websites related to the story. This can be done on new e-reading devices like the Kindle, iPad, iPhone, smart phones, tablets, and regular desktop and laptop computers. These links within the story allow readers to instantly learn about the real places without doing their own web searches. The first classic novel to take advantage of tourism fiction technology was

F. Scott Fitzgerald Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term he popularize ...

's ''This Side of Paradise: Interactive Tourism Edition'', published by the Southeastern Literary Tourism Initiative in 2012. The tourism edition offered web links to tours of Princeton University, where Fitzgerald attended in real life and where the fictional protagonist in the novel Amory Blaine attended. The tourism edition also offered links to

Montgomery, Alabama Montgomery is the capital city of the U.S. state of Alabama and the county seat of Montgomery County. Named for the Irish soldier Richard Montgomery, it stands beside the Alabama River, on the coastal Plain of the Gulf of Mexico. In the 202 ...

, where Fitzgerald fell in love with his future wife Zelda Sayre, much like the fictional character Amory fell in love with Rosalind.

Bookstore tourism

In addition to visiting author and book sites, literary tourists often engage in

bookstore tourism Bookstore tourism is a type of cultural tourism that promotes independent bookstores as a group travel destination. It started as a grassroots effort to support locally owned and operated bookshops, many of which have struggled to compete with la ...

, browsing local bookshops for titles specifically related to the sites as well as other regional books and authors.

Tourism sites for specific writers and works, by country

China

* Du Fu Thatched Cottage,

Chengdu Chengdu (, ; Simplified Chinese characters, simplified Chinese: 成都; pinyin: ''Chéngdū''; Sichuanese dialects, Sichuanese pronunciation: , Standard Chinese pronunciation: ), Chinese postal romanization, alternatively Romanization of Chi ...

Lu Xun Native Place Lu Xun Native Place (Simplify ) is the childhood home and neighborhood of Lu Xun. Lu Xun is his pen name; his legal name was Zhou Zhangshou, and later renamed himself Zhou Shuren. Lu is one of the foremost writers of Chinese literature in the ear ...

France

Maison de Balzac The Maison de Balzac ( en, Balzac's House) is a writer's house museum in the former residence of French novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850). It is located in the 16th arrondissement at 47, rue Raynouard, Paris, France, and open daily except ...

Maison de Victor Hugo Maison de Victor Hugo () is a writer's house museum located where Victor Hugo lived for 16 years between 1832 and 1848.Information sheet from the Maire de Paris entitled 'Maisons de Victor Hugo'. It is one of the 14 City of Paris' Museums that hav ...

House of George Sand The House of George Sand is a writer's house museum in the village of Nohant, in the Indre department of France. It was the home of George Sand (born as Aurore Dupin; 1804–1876), a French author, and was purchased by the French state in 1 ...

Germany

Goethe House The Goethe House is a writer's house museum located in the Innenstadt district of Frankfurt, Germany. It is the birthplace and childhood home of German poet and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It is also the place where Goethe wrote hi ...

Frankfurt Frankfurt, officially Frankfurt am Main (; Hessian: , "Frank ford on the Main"), is the most populous city in the German state of Hesse. Its 791,000 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located on its na ...

Gutenberg Museum The Gutenberg Museum is one of the oldest museums of printing in the world, located opposite the cathedral in the old part of Mainz, Germany. It is named after Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of printing from movable metal type in Western Euro ...

Japan

* Endo Shusaku Literary Museum,

Nagasaki is the capital and the largest city of Nagasaki Prefecture on the island of Kyushu in Japan. It became the sole port used for trade with the Portuguese and Dutch during the 16th through 19th centuries. The Hidden Christian Sites in the ...

* Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum *

Osamu Dazai Memorial Museum The , also commonly referred to as , is a writer's home museum located in the Kanagi area of Goshogawara in Aomori Prefecture, Japan. It is dedicated to the late author Osamu Dazai, who spent some of his early childhood in Kanagi, and houses ant ...

Picture Book Museum The Museum of Picture Books, also known as the Picture Book Library, is located in Iwaki City, Fukushima Prefecture in Japan. In 2005, Japanese architect Tadao Ando designed this privately owned special library mainly to serve three preschools. H ...

* Saka no Ue no Kumo Museum,

Matsuyama, Ehime 270px, Matsuyama City Hall 270px, Ehime Prefectural Capital Building is the capital city of Ehime Prefecture on the island of Shikoku in Japan and also Shikoku's largest city. , the city had an estimated population of 505,948 in 243541 househo ...

Shiki Museum The Matsuyama City is a museum devoted mainly to the life and work of Japanese writer Masaoka Shiki, who was born and raised in Matsuyama. Shiki is widely considered to be the most important figure in the modernization of both haiku and tanka ...

Tōson Memorial Museum is a museum in Magome-juku, Nakatsugawa, Gifu Prefecture, Japan dedicated to the life and works of Shimazaki Tōson. The writer was born in the former Honjin in 1872, but his birthplace and childhood home was mostly destroyed in the conflagra ...

Netherlands

Anne Frank House The Anne Frank House ( nl, Anne Frank Huis) is a writer's house and biographical museum dedicated to Jewish wartime diarist Anne Frank. The building is located on a canal called the Prinsengracht, close to the Westerkerk, in central Amsterdam ...

United Kingdom

Brantwood Brantwood is a historic house museum in Cumbria, England, overlooking Coniston Water. It has been the home of a number of prominent people. The house and grounds are administered by a charitable trust, the house being a museum dedicated to Jo ...

(

John Ruskin John Ruskin (8 February 1819 20 January 1900) was an English writer, philosopher, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and politi ...

) * Brontë Parsonage *

Burns Cottage Burns Cottage, the first home of Robert Burns is located in Alloway, South Ayrshire, Scotland. It was built by his father, William Burness in 1757. Burns, Scotland's national poet, was born there on 25 January 1759. It is a two-roomed clay and ...

Carlyle's House Carlyle's House, in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, central London, was the home of the Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane from 1834 until his death. The home of these writers was purchased by public subscription ...

Charles Dickens Museum The Charles Dickens Museum is an author's house museum at 48 Doughty Street in King's Cross, in the London Borough of Camden. It occupies a typical Georgian terraced house which was Charles Dickens's home from 25 March 1837 (a year after his ...

Dove Cottage Dove Cottage is a house on the edge of Grasmere in the Lake District of England. It is best known as the home of the poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth from December 1799 to May 1808, where they spent over eight years of ...

(

William Wordsworth William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication ''Lyrical Ballads'' (1798). Wordsworth's ' ...

) * Jane Austen's House Museum,

Chawton Chawton is a village and civil parish in the East Hampshire district of Hampshire, England. The village lies within the South Downs National Park and is famous as the home of Jane Austen for the last eight years of her life. History Chawton's re ...

Keats House Keats House is a writer's house museum in what was once the home of the Romantic poet John Keats. It is in Keats Grove, Hampstead, toward the edge of inner north London. Maps before about 1915 show the road with one of its earlier names, John S ...

Sherlock Holmes Museum The Sherlock Holmes Museum is a privately run museum in London, England, dedicated to the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. It is the world's first museum dedicated to the literary character Sherlock Holmes. It opened in 1990 and is ...

United States

Edgar Allan Poe Cottage The Edgar Allan Poe Cottage (or Poe Cottage) is the former home of American writer Edgar Allan Poe. It is located on Kingsbridge Road and the Grand Concourse in the Fordham neighborhood of the Bronx, New York, a short distance from its origi ...

Bronx, New York The Bronx () is a Boroughs of New York City, borough of New York City, coextensive with Bronx County, in the U.S. state, state of New York (state), New York. It is south of Westchester County, New York, Westchester County; north and east of the ...

Ernest Hemingway House The Ernest Hemingway House was the residence of American writer Ernest Hemingway in the 1930s. The house is situated on the island of Key West in Florida. It is at 907 Whitehead Street, across from the Key West Lighthouse, close to the southern ...

* Paul Laurence Dunbar House * Walt Whitman House,

Camden, New Jersey Camden is a city in and the county seat of Camden County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. Camden is part of the Delaware Valley metropolitan area and is located directly across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At the 2020 ...

Regional literary tourism sites

Japan

* Kamakura Museum of Literature

South Africa

KZN Literary Tourism KZN Literary Tourism is a literary tourism research project initiated in 2002 by Professor Lindy Stiebel, a lecturer in the English Studies department at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The project has created an online archive of over a 100 writ ...

KwaZulu-Natal KwaZulu-Natal (, also referred to as KZN and known as "the garden province") is a province of South Africa that was created in 1994 when the Zulu bantustan of KwaZulu ("Place of the Zulu" in Zulu) and Natal Province were merged. It is locate ...

KwaZulu-Natal map

South Korea

Museum of Korean Modern Literature The Museum of Korean Modern Literature is a literature museum in Jangchung-dong, Jung-gu, Seoul, Jung-gu, Seoul, South Korea. There are numerous xylophone exhibits. See also *List of museums in South Korea External linksOfficial site
Mus ...

References

{{Authority control Cultural tourism Fiction Types of tourism