Attuning to the affective in literary tourism: Emotional states inAberystwyth, Mon Amour.

Abstract

On a literary walking tour, many emotional 'states' are experienced by participants. These states have multiple causes, products and consequences, influenced in part by the socio-spatial identities of participants, their own imagined versions of the novel, and the material and cultural geographies of the tour itself. The Literary Atlas project sought to examine these emotional states by conducting literary walking tours based on Englishlanguage novels set in Wales. This paper attunes to the emotional states experienced by participants on one of these tours, based on the locations in Malcolm Pryce's Aberystwyth Mon Amour. The paper examines the ways in which these states cohere and collide to actively constitute the ongoing composition of the real-and-imagined worlds produced through this emergent literary geography.