Literary Tourism

Book excerpt: Literary tourism is a nascent field in tourism studies, yet tourists often travel in the footsteps of well-known authors and stories. Providing a wide-ranging cornucopia of literary tourism topics, this book fully explores the interconnections between the written word and travel. It includes tourism stories using guidebooks, films, television and electronic media, and recognises that stories, texts and narratives, even if they cannot be classified as traditional travel writing, can become journeys in themselves and take us on imaginary voyages. Appealing to a wide audience of different disciplines, it encompasses subjects such as business literary writing, historical journeys and the poetry of Dylan Thomas. The use of these different perspectives demonstrates how heavily and widely literature influences travel, tourists and tourism, making it an important read for researchers and students of tourism, social science and literature.