Homes and Haunts

Abstract

Literary tourism and books known as homes and haunts developed in 1810–50 as readers were moved to visit the locales of renowned writers and their works. Yet academic studies have disparaged not only pilgrimages and relic-collecting but also writing about literary landmarks and “countries.” By the 1890s, house museums were increasingly established, and books of literary geography documented Dickens or Hawthorne by place. Homes and Haunts is the first full-length transatlantic critical history of these phenomena. This illustrated book, for general as well as specialist readers, includes first-person tours. Retracing literary reception and hospitality from 1820 to 1940, it unites museum and tourism studies, book history, narrative theory, theories of gender, space, and things, and other approaches to the practices and places that shaped canons of English and American literature, from New England to Shakespeare Country. Chapters detail haunting encounters and sites ranging from literary shrines and plaques to guidebooks, memoirs, and portraits. The reader meets such professional pilgrims as William and Mary Howitt, Anna Maria and Samuel Hall, and Elbert Hubbard, and such magnetic hosts and guests as Washington Irving, Wordsworth, Martineau, Longfellow, and James. Woolf’s criticism of literary houses shapes one chapter on Mary Russell Mitford, Gaskell, and the Brontës, and another on the Carlyles’ house and her own Monk’s House. Homes and Haunts rediscovers haunting collections and re-enactments that have been marginalized by a century of academic literary criticism and that find new forms in the Internet era.

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