Nicola J. Watson, ed. Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ISBN 978-0-230-22281-6. Price: US $80.00/£50.00

A couple of years ago, on a visit to Kelmscott Manor—William Morris’s country home near Lechlade—I overhead a brief exchange between two men waiting for their tour group to assemble. “This is a nice place,” the first man observed. The second man replied, “Lovely. Not much parking, though.” The dissonance between the auratic appeal of a site like Kelmscott and the pragmatic demands of the twenty-first-century tourist drawn to such sites is probably familiar to us all. As Nicola Watson points out in the introduction to this edited collection, literary tourism—“the interconnected practices of visiting and marking sites associated with writers and their work” (2)—is far from an uncomplicated phenomenon, implicating the often-conflicting discursive practices of cultural heritage, mass tourism, biography, history, and literary criticism. This volume explicitly seeks to address a perceived lack of critical attention to the practices of literary tourism. But, more contentiously, it attributes this lack of scholarship in the area to the “embarrassment of literary tourism” (5), due to the conflict between the “highbrow” associations and professionalism of literary studies and the mass appeal of modern tourism. The volume understandably focuses on the nineteenth century, the period in which the practice of visiting sites associated with writers became commercially significant. Readers not only increasingly wanted to visit the homes, birthplaces, and graves of favourite authors but also to traverse and experience landscapes that came to be indissolubly linked with particular writers (e.g., Burns’s Scotland,Dickens’s London, and,Hardy’s Wessex). The memorialization and accompanying commodification of writers’ lives was closely connected with place and landscape, a process that became even more pronounced in the twentieth century and shows no sign of withering in an era of mass travel, heritage tourism and television dramatizations. The essays included in this volume reflect cross-disciplinary interest in the topic but share a number of related concerns, such as the gendering of literary tourism, the invention of national identity, and issues of authenticity and genre. To situate the volume historically, Harald Hendrix’s chapter traces the shift from early-modern memorial culture to Romantic literary tourism. Early-modern literary memorial culture was predominantly author-centred but also marked by a degree of ironic self-reflexivity. Hendrix offers the example of Petrarch’s mummified cat, recorded in most accounts of visits to Arquà from the end of the sixteenth century, which was variously an object of jest or the instigator of censorious comments, some of which were even inscribed on the marble slab surrounding the relic. Thus began a phenomenon of literary tourism that subsequent chapters (such as those by Foster and Booth) also record: “the opportunity to engage in this profane pilgrimage and yet simultaneously to criticize it” (17). By the mid-eighteenth century, however, literary pilgrimages were increasingly inspired by the fictions and their locations, not simply by the genius of the author. Rousseau’s Julie (1761) and Lake Geneva, for instance, like the association that would later emerge between Sir Walter Scott and the Scottish Highlands, fused the evocative allure of specific landscapes with the fictional worlds of the author’s texts. Subsequent essays also address the topic of the writer’s house, arguably the key site in formations of literary tourism. As Julian North notes, the making of the poet’s house in nineteenth-century biography was a means by which the practice of literary tourism was encouraged, as the success of William Howitt’s Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets (1847) aptly demonstrated. But, as North also shows, the poet’s house became a contested space; Wordsworth, Coleridge and Browning all protested against the public’s desire for access to the writer’s domestic space. Nineteenth-century poets “used the writer’s house as …