The touring reader: Understanding the bibliophile's experience of literary tourism

Abstract

This research explores the literary enthusiast's experience of planning and undertaking literary inspired trips. The research reconceptualises the dominant figure of the literary pilgrim, inspired to visit sites associated with favourite authors, by using detailed results from 30 open-ended surveys distributed to delegates at a literary conference. The findings indicate that these keen readers prefer to plan their own trips and shun organised attractions and mainstream tourist information in favour of employing the texts themselves as source material. Respondents then feed back their experiences into the re-reading of the literary text. These findings are analysed using the concept of concretisation borrowed from literary theory. This concept, which has not been used in previous tourist studies, reflects the experience of these visitors who are using travel to solidify their reading of favourite books. This research therefore highlights the interdependence of texts and travels and emphasises the important role that imagination plays in the experience and recollection of tourist trips.

Revealing the Literary Landscape: Research Lines and Challenges of Literary Tourism Studies

“…As far as detailed interviews as a methodology is concerned, in most cases the predominant aim has been to analyze and assess the management of literary tourism in specific areas (Añel & Vila, 2016 process that helps to fill with meaning certain spaces in destinations which are part of literary tours (van Es & Reijnders, 2018), what factors are present in the planning phase of a literary trip (MacLeod et al, 2018), or what role the touristic experience plays in creating literary spaces (Jiang & Xu, 2016.…”

Literary urban landscape in a sustainable tourism context

“…Hence, the study and analysis of landscape and its intangible connotation is crucial when generating a proposal for literary tourism. This last idea, which is considered a forerunner for other forms of media tourism like lm-induced tourism (MacLeod, Shelley and Morrison, 2018), is related with ction and author (Hoppen, Brown and Fyall, 2014) and it answers to the desire of people to link their reality to other past or ctional worlds (Squire, 1996).…”

The concept of organizing educational literary tourism by means of information technologies as a region development tool

“…4. Popularization of literary works as a source material before the start of tourist activities [3].…”

“…The business tourism is also interested in data analytics to distinguish the types of tourists based on the choice of places of their visit and traffic patterns [11]. In the works [3,5], the problems of planning literary tourism are considered, and it is also noted that keen readers prefer to plan their trips and avoid organized attractions, criticizing the methods of mass literary tourism.…”