
Homes and Haunts
Touring Writers' Shrines and Countries
Alison Booth(Author)
Oxford University Press
Published on 28. July 2016
Book
Hardback
352 pages
978-0-19-875909-6 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
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 *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
684 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-875909-6 (9780198759096)
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
09/2016
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€50.49
Available for download

E-Book
09/2016
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€43.49
Available for download
Person
Alison Booth is Professor of English and Academic Director, Scholars Lab, at the University of Virginia
Content
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS; BIBLIOGRAPHY; INDEX