Commissioned Museum-Literature

Chiara Zampieri (KU Leuven / RIMELL, Belgium)

Commissioned museum-literature is a worldwide phenomenon that emerged in the early 2000s in conjunction with the so-called “contemporary writing outside of the book” (Rosenthal & Ruffel, 2010). At the crossroads between museum practice and literary practice, commissioned museum-literature involves commissioning contemporary writers to create literary works inspired by museums and heritage sites, to be realised in close collaboration with museum institutions. While being creative productions, commissioned museum-literatures are also a branding device intended to contribute to the promotion of museums, to the attraction of a diversified audience, and the patrimonialisation of heritage. Commissioned museum-literature may assume various forms, which include autofictions, short stories, poems, and graphic novels, and may rely on different media, including paperback volumes, e-books, YouTube videos and audiobooks. These literary productions are all embedded in larger editorial projects, which may include collections, publishers’ series and collective volumes.

The earliest example of a commissioned literary work realised in collaboration with a museum and openly presented as such can be traced back to 1995, when, on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary, the Elvehjem Museum of Art – known today as Chazen Museum of Art (Madison, Wisconsin) – published the volume Wisconsin Poets at the Elvehjem Museum of Art forwarded by the museum director Russel Panczenko (Panczenko, 1995). Under the sign of the Horatian principle “Ut pictura poesis”, on this occasion, thirty-four American poets were invited to visit the Elvehjem Museum and to write a poem inspired by the artworks exhibited in the museum’s halls. The volume resulting from this initiative includes, in addition to the thirty-four poems, thirty-four coloured plates representing the paintings that inspired each poem.

In the following decades and up to the present day, the practice of commissioning literary works inspired by museums and their heritage has continued to multiply, manifesting itself in ever-new, technologically advanced formats and platforms. In 2010, the British weekly magazine The Economist inaugurated an “Authors on Museum” column in its 1843 supplement. The formula is simple: in each supplement issue, a writer is invited to return to a museum that has special meaning for them and write a short text about this nostos experience. In 2012, the Archaeological Museum of Naples (MANN) asked forty poets to compose poems inspired by the displayed ruins and statues. Likewise, in 2013, the Château de Versailles invited fifteen poets to celebrate its gardens in verses and, on the other side of the Channel, the National Museum of Ireland also solicited more than forty poets for the writing of poems in both English and Gaelic inspired by their national heritage. Since 2014, the Musée des Confluences in Lyon has regularly asked writers to produce short stories inspired by the artefacts preserved in the museum’s exhibition halls and storerooms. The same approach was then rapidly adopted by Museo Borgogna in Vercelli (2017); Musée d’Angers (2019); Musée d’Orsay (2019), Musée d’Art de Nantes (2021); and by the MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome (2021). As of 2018, and at the initiative of Alina Gurdiel and her media agency, several museums (including the Louvre, Musée Picasso, Museo del Greco, Punta della Dogana, and the Acropolis Museum) have gone much further, allowing writers to spend an entire night, alone, among their artworks. Writers, in return, are then asked to write a book about this overnight experience. Since 2005, with the initiative “Le Louvre en bande dessinée” launched by the Editions du Louvre, this collaboration model between museums and literature has also broadened into the universe of comics and graphic novels. On the same wavelength, but with a strong educational slant, since 2018 the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Tourism has been financing the vast project “Fumetti nei Musei” which counts no less than 51 albums dedicated to Italy’s major museums. Although the book object still represents the preferred format for this kind of project, there is also an increasing number of initiatives that take advantage of the possibilities offered by the virtual realm, these include YouTube, audiobooks, QR Codes and the Metaverse.

Commissioned museum-literatures can be implemented at the request of and/or in collaboration with various entities, including museums, heritage sites, writers’ houses, publishing houses, periodicals, media agencies and ministries of culture (Zampieri, 2023). To investigate commissioned museum-literatures, accounting for the type of entity at the origin of the commission is of paramount importance since, as pointed out by Adrien Chassain and Hélène Martinelli (Chassain & Martinelli, 2020), commissioning acquires multiple functions and values depending on the spaces it invests and the actors it involves. Indeed, every space and every actor involved in the implementation of a commission (be it literary or artistic) carries with it a certain amount of visibility and a specific symbolic capital that has a significant bearing on the reception and circulation of the work resulting from the commission. When it comes to commissions implemented at the request of, or in collaboration with, museums, issues of visibility and symbolic capital are crucial (Martens, 2021; Martens, 2022).

Regardless of their level of involvement, through the commissioning of museum-literature, museums can present themselves as institutions that collect and store art and actively produce it, soliciting contemporary creators. In these terms, commissioned museum-literatures are also branding devices involved in creating and conveying an image of the museum as a dynamic place of artistic creation, open to renegotiating its boundaries and positioning in the museum field.  Furthermore, commissioned museum-literature also represents an essential means of communication, promotion, mediation and advertising (Zampieri & Martens, 2024). Indeed, commissioned museum-literature allows heritage to circulate through non-traditional channels (those of literature), thus reaching an audience that museums would otherwise have been unlikely to approach. Through these publications, museums can attract a wider audience – including visitors who might discover the museum precisely through their interest in the solicited writer. This is especially true when the museum invites the writer to literary events and book presentations following the publication of the commissioned volume.

Writers, for their part, also benefit significantly from the acceptance of writing commissions in collaborations with museums. Simply by being invited to collaborate on a project with a museum – the quintessential place of prestige and high culture in the Western world – writers are invested with recognition and prestige, which can only confirm, and even increase, the visibility and symbolic capital that prompted their invitation in the first place. While commissioned museum-literature might limit the author’s creativity by imposing a set of formal and thematic constraints, at the same time, it also allows the resulting volume to reach a wider audience – the museum’s audience –, which is not necessarily an audience of readers. In addition, a visitor who, at the end of their visit, buys the volume because of its tie to the museum may also take an interest in the author, thus buying more of their books and discovering their entire oeuvre. The impact of these benefits and outcomes clearly depends on the museum’s size, budget and visibility.

Finally, publishing houses also profit from being involved in commissioned museum-literatures. Regarding visibility, like the writers, publishing houses benefit from being associated with a prestigious cultural institution, such as a museum. Through these collaborations, publishing houses are also entitled to publish authors traditionally affiliated with other publishing houses, thereby expanding their readership and catalogue. Considering that these publications often correspond to large-scale editorial projects (publisher’s series, anthologies, series, collective volumes, etc.), the publishing house can also count on the loyalty of its readers. Moreover, readers loyal to each of the solicited writers will likely buy that writer’s volume and those of other authors who have participated in the same initiative.

Commissioned museum-literature results from the interaction of these three poles and the combination of their respective symbolic capitals. This three-pole system (museum-author-publishing house) enacts a variety of symbolic, patrimonial, and economic interactions, resulting in each actor benefiting from and consolidating the symbolic, patrimonial, and economic capital of the other two actors involved.

How to cite this entry: Zampieri, C. (2023). Commissioned Museum-Literature. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.). E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia.

References

Chassain, A., & Martinelli, H. (2022). Introduction. La commande littéraire aux XXe et XXIe siècles: territoires, discours, pratiques. COnTEXTES, (29), https://doi.org/10.4000/contextes.9531

Martens, D. (2022). Un écrivain dans les couloirs du Louvre. Les pas de côté du commissaire Toussaint. Recherches et travaux, 100. https://journals.openedition.org/recherchestravaux/5094

Martens, D. (2021). “Ouvrir une boîte comme on ouvre la bouche”: Le maniement de l’archive par l’écrivain-commissaire dans les cartes blanches de l’IMEC. Littérature, 230, 118-136.

Panczenko, R. (Ed.). (1995). Wisconsin Poets at the Elvehjem Museum of Art, Elvehjem Museum of Art/University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Rosenthal, O., & Ruffel, L. (Eds.). (2010). La littérature exposée. Les écritures contemporaines hors du livre, Littérature, 4(160), 3-13.

Zampieri, C. (2023). Muséo-littératures. Les musées et la commande aux écrivain.e.s contemporain.e.s (1998-2022). La Lettre de l’OCIM, (207). [Accepted for publication.]

Zampieri, C. & Martens, D. (2024) Un noctambulisme de commande. De la carte blanche au marketing éditorial: La collection “Ma nuit au musée” (Stock). Communication & langages. [Accepted for publication].

Heritage Accommodation and Literary Tourism

Pedro Vaz Serra & Cláudia Seabra (University of Coimbra, CEGOT – Geography and Spatial Planning Research Centre, Coimbra, Portugal)

Heritage accommodation refers to units that carry historical significance and generate a heritage experience through the convergence of tangible and intangible elements (Xie & Shi, 2020), thereby incorporating a sense of depth and originality (Elshaer et al., 2022). This type of accommodation is recognised by tourists and guests as promoting the integration of history and tourism, thereby generating contemporary meanings (Bright et al., 2020). This is a scenario resulting from a gradually growing interest in art, culture and history, with increasing demand for heritage accommodation and a gradual increase in units that fulfil this function and that design, communicate and facilitate value-generating tourist experiences (Elshaer et al., 2022). 

One of the growing concerns in the development of these accommodation units is the crucial need to preserve the built cultural environment (Elshaer et al., 2022) whose architectural importance can contribute to the development of future generations, standing out as an existing resource of structures, elements and materials (Bright et al., 2020), where the heritage itself constitutes a tourist experience (Tu, 2020). To understand the uniqueness sought in heritage accommodation encounters, it is essential to examine which experiences can satisfy the needs and expectations of contemporary cultural consumption (Elshaer et al., 2022), identified as a collection of material, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional content that sets a community apart, including architecture and art, tangible and intangible heritage, gastronomic experiences, musical chords, creative industries, and living cultures, framed by the literature and identified with the segment type associated with heritage accommodation units (Richards, 2021).  

Literary tourism is motivated by the desire to visit a destination because of its literary significance (Baleiro & Quinteiro, 2018) and can be further enriched by integrating the unique features of heritage accommodation. Through a combination of architecture, decoration, and context, it creates a heritage setting that allows visitors to explore, experience, and immerse themselves in this environment, which becomes a significant cultural and historical marker (Richards, 2021; Tu, 2020). Such integration contributes to the cultural development of destinations and aligns with sustainable tourism practices by creating tourist experiences, such as itineraries or infrastructure linked to literary heritage, thereby boosting attractiveness and competitiveness (Rodrigues et al., 2024). These experiences include visits to literary sites, which gain significance from their associations with writers and the settings of their works, forming an integral part of the heritage tourism landscape (Baleiro & Quinteiro, 2018). Literature is therefore a relevant cultural heritage, serving as an informative and documentary resource of the utmost importance for collective memory, identity, meaning and transmission to future generations (Richards, 2021).

In this context, there are literary hotels, which (i) include a literary theme in their offering; (ii) are associated with an author; (iii) are dedicated to an author; (iv) are identified with a literary work; (v) are library hotels (Çevik, 2022). These lodging units, which may or may not be synonymous with heritage accommodation, do not represent a homogeneous tourist product but rather a broader, more comprehensive concept with a wide range of offerings, including products and experiences aimed at a broader target audience (Çevik, 2022).

As an instance of heritage accommodation, some units hosted celebrated writers, who worked there or drew inspiration from them. The connection with literature is historical, but the hotel was not built specifically for that purpose. This is the case of the Pera Palace Hotel (Istanbul), a charming 19th-century property where Ernest Hemingway stayed several times and where Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express in room 411 (Pera Palace Hotel, 2026).

Other units have been repurposed for tourism from residences or workspaces of writers, such as GoldenEye (Jamaica), an imposing property with magnificent gardens, private beaches, and lakes, owned by Ian Fleming, the author who, through his writing, made James Bond famous (Reveal World, 2026). There are also heritage lodging establishments that have literature as their central theme, such as The Literary Man Obidos Hotel (Portugal), housed in a 19th-century building, which, with its approximately 100,000 books, is one of the most significant literary hotels in the world (The Literary Man Obidos Hotel, 2026).

The convergence of heritage-based accommodation with literature implies a cultural tourism scenario which reflects contemporary preferences, with a predominant search for distinctive experiences (Tu, 2020). Heritage encompasses various dimensions of culture, identity, language, and locality (Tu, 2020), which contribute to a sense of belonging, roots, and even the order and continuity of a collective future (Richards, 2021).

In the present time, the heritage is updated based on evaluation criteria, which assign different meanings to places, practices, or objects that originated in the past and are re-evaluated in terms of heritage (Bos et al., 2025), with implications for tourism and for past, present and future generations is particularly relevant due to its aesthetic, historical, scientific, social and spiritual dimensions (Vaz Serra et al., 2023). This implies the creation, maintenance, and transmission of new forms of harmony in the relationship between heritage and community; that is, memories are dynamic and depend on the cultural environment, moral sensibility, and contemporary demands (Choay, 2017).

In this context, the tourist experience resulting from the convergence between heritage accommodation and literary tourism reflects a reality in which the historical and heritage value of accommodation units and literature has an increasing influence on tourists’ decision-making and guest satisfaction, an essential element for tourism competitiveness and sustainability (Vaz Serra et al., 2023).

Literary tourism, in this context, can be an element that induces experiential value through the interaction between guests’ needs and expectations and the inherent attributes of an offering in which literary culture is an omnipresent and distinctive element, thereby challenging its appreciation and enjoyment.

How to cite this entry: Vaz Serra, P., & Seabra, C. (2026). Heritage accommodation and literary tourism. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

References

Baleiro, R., & Quinteiro, S. (2018). Key concepts in literature and tourism studies. Centro de Estudos Comparatistas, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa. https://repositorio.ulisboa.pt/handle/10451/38442?locale=en

Bos, M., Claeys, D., Stiernon, D., & Vandenbroucke, D. (2025). Objectivising heritage assessment with values: a criteria-based grid and a constructivist approach. Heritage, 8(4), 116. https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage8040116

Bright, C., Foster, K., Joyner, T., & Tanny, O. (2020). Heritage tourism, historic roadside markers and “just representation” in Tennessee, USA. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 29(2-3), 428-447.  https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2020.1768264

Çevik, S. (2022). Literary hotels: A new type of literary tourism or just a product? Dos Algarves: Tourism, Hospitality & Management Journal, 42, 25–48. https://doi.org/10.18089/DAMeJ.2022.42.2

Choay, F. (2017). Alegoria do património. Edições 70.

Elshaer, I. A., Fayyad, S., Ammar, S., Abdulaziz, T. A., & Mahmoud, S. W. (2022). Adaptive reuse of heritage houses and hotel conative loyalty: Digital technology as a moderator and memorable tourism and hospitality experience as a mediator. Sustainability, 14(6), Article 6. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14063580

Pera Palace Hotel. (2026). The literary adventure of Ernest Hemingway and the traces that he left at Pera Palace. https://perapalace.com/en/the-literary-adventure-of-ernest-hemingway-and-the-traces-that-he-left-at-pera-palace/

Reveal World (2026). Reveal World | GoldenEye Hotel & Resort, Oracabessa, Jamaica (Ian Fleming). https://reveal.world/en/story/mir-oteli-v-kotoryh-zhili-velikie-pisateli-i-byli-napisany-velikie-knigi-i-gde-segodnya-mozhete-ostanovit-sya-vy-v2-5137/goldeneye-is-a-mansion-now-a-hotel-of-the-famous-novelist-ian-fleming-in-oracabe

Richards, G. (2021). Rethinking cultural tourism. Edward Elgar Publishing Limited. https://pt.richardstourism.com/_files/ugd/d0456c_9d5d05385a56415f85809669650a429e.pdf

Rodrigues, C., Liberato, D., Esteves, E., Sousa, B., Liberato, P., Costa, A., Pereira, C., Malheiro, M. A., & Carvalho, P. (2024). Literary tourism: Literature developments and research lines from 2015 to 2020. In V. Katsoni & G. Cassar (Eds), Recent Advancements in Tourism Business, Technology and Social Sciences (pp. 845–873). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54338-8_50

The Literary Man Obidos Hotel. (2026). The Literary Man. https://www.theliteraryman.pt//homepage

Tu, H.-M. (2020). The attractiveness of adaptive heritage reuse: A theoretical framework. Sustainability, 12(6), Article 6. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12062372

Vaz Serra, P., Seabra, C., & Caldeira, A. (2023). From cultural heritage to cultural tourism: A historical-conceptual approach. In J. V. Carvalho, A. Abreu, P. Liberato, & A. Peña (Eds), Advances in Tourism, Technology and Systems: Selected Papers from ICOTTS 2022, Volume 1 (pp. 91–101). Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0337-5_8

Xie, P. F., & Shi, W. L. (2020). Elucidating the characteristics of heritage hotels. Anatolia, 31(4), 670–673. https://doi.org/10.1080/13032917.2020.1744456

Harry Potter Tourism

Juliana R. V. Tkatch (University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA) & Carissa Baker (University of Central Florida, USA)

The global phenomenon of Harry Potter tourism marks a significant moment for the experience economy (Pine & Gilmore, 1999) in tourism. The transition from books to movies or video games (media products), to film-induced tourism sites (services), and to themed entertainment (experiential offerings) reflects the progression of economic value. Originally rooted in the seven-novel series by J.K. Rowling (1997–2007), the franchise’s expansion into an eight-film cinematic saga (McCabe, 2011), multiple video games, and subsequent development of the ‘Wizarding World’ branding have redefined how fans consume stories, transitioning from imaginative immersion to narrative spaces. As a contemporary form of media pilgrimage, Harry Potter tourism encompasses literary tourism as defined by Croy (2013), film tourism (Heitmann, 2010), and diverse locations across the United Kingdom, as well as hyper-real, purpose-built environments such as theme parks and studio tours.

Harry Potter tourism can be categorised using a multi-tiered framework that accounts for varying levels of fan engagement (Table 1):

Table 1: Categories, primary driver, and examples of attractions in Harry Potter Tourism 

Source: The authors based on Croy (2021), Heitmann (2010), and Seaton et al. (2017).

Harry Potter tourism is characterised by a shift from passive readers to active searchers. Tourism impetus can be biographical, related to the author’s life, such as J.K. Rowling’s childhood home, Church Cottage in the village of Tutshill.

Visitation can also be spurred by the sites of the author’s creative process during the development of the Harry Potter series. Edinburgh, where much of the first novel was written, serves as the primary author’s process-related destination. Locations such as The Elephant House café, The Balmoral hotel, and Greyfriars Kirkyard—where tombstones bear names like Thomas Riddell—have become essential sites for fans seeking the real places and characters that inspired the author when creating the books. British locales have leveraged their associations with the franchise to create a ‘Wizarding’ heritage. For example, the Potter Trail offers tours of Edinburgh’s Old Town, as well as activities such as potion-making, afternoon tea, and escape rooms.

Some entertainment options and tourist attractions extend the original fiction into new products. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a play inspired by the original books that continues the story of the characters through their children’s adventures. The play is celebrating 10 years of running at London’s West End Palace Theatre and offers tourist hospitality experiences through thematic hotel stays and a pre-theatre meal (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, n.d.).

Media-induced tourism is a contemporary phenomenon in which the cinematic gaze transforms ordinary geographical sites into tourism destinations. It represents a symbiotic relationship between the entertainment industry and the experience economy, in which the physical location serves as a bridge between the viewer’s imagination and tangible reality. The transition from literary to film-induced tourism shifted the focus toward visual authenticity. This is most evident in the change of heritage sites into filming locations, where historical sites are recontextualised through the lens of fiction:

• Alnwick Castle and Gloucester Cathedral provided the architectural skeleton for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
• The Glenfinnan Viaduct in Scotland attracts thousands of visitors annually who wait to photograph the Jacobite steam train, effectively rebranding a functional piece of railway heritage as the “Hogwarts Express.”
• King’s Cross Station, London, is the hub of the UK transportation system, featuring a permanent fictional sign reading “Platform 9 3/4” and a luggage trolley embedded in a brick wall, materialising the fictional space and blurring the line between utility and fantasy.
• Goathland Station, Yorkshire, along the route of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, serves as the stand-in for Hogsmeade Station in the first film. 

Types of Harry Potter Tourism

Harry Potter tourism extends beyond real-world sites; it is characterised by the creation of immersive environments from travelling Forbidden Forest spaces to permanent theme park lands. Unlike the dispersed filming locations, these sites offer a ludic experience where the tourist is no longer a spectator but a participant in the storyworld.

Commercial Sites

While other Harry Potter-based sites include merchandise, stand-alone, thematic retail locations such as the Harry Potter Shop New York and The Harry Potter Shop at Platform 9 ¾ provide visitors the ability to purchase items related to the Harry Potter intellectual property (IP) that connect with the story and can be brought into a person’s home life.  

Temporary or Touring Exhibits

Harry Potter sites have included several exhibits that tour different regions, including Harry Potter: The Exhibition, an indoor experience that allows visitors to interact with sets as a wizard, and Harry Potter: A Forbidden Forest Experience, a nighttime walking trail featuring props and participatory elements. 

Screen Tourism and Immersive Crossover Experiences

A popular visitor attraction in London and Tokyo, Warner Bros. Studio Tour – The Making of Harry Potter showcases authentic elements (props, costumes) and museum-like exhibits, while also providing immersive entertainment through displays such as the walkable Diagon Alley and the evocative set pieces of the Forbidden Forest.

Themed and Immersive Experiences

The pinnacle of Harry Potter-based tourism is The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, a set of elaborate themed lands within theme parks produced by Universal Destinations & Experiences in Florida, USA; Osaka, Japan; California, USA; and Beijing, China. These lands altered the design paradigm of the attractions industry through their attention to detail and storyworld authenticity, as well as by encouraging participatory culture through elements such as wizard robes and interactive wands. Florida’s theme parks include three distinct locations with the Hogwarts Express train ride connecting the first two: (1) The Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Hogsmeade, Universal Islands of Adventure, opened in 2010, representing Hogwarts Castle and Hogsmeade Village in Scotland. (2) The Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Diagon Alley, Universal Studios Florida, opened in 2014; representing Diagon Alley in London, England (3) The Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Ministry of Magic, Universal Epic Universe, opened in 2025; representing 1920s Paris (from the Fantastic Beasts spin-off series) and the 1990s British Ministry.    

Event Bases

In addition to unofficial fan or academic events throughout the world, there have been sanctioned offerings to engage with Harry Potter but also gather with other devotees, including A Celebration of Harry Potter (Universal Orlando Resort, 2014-2018) and Forbidden Forest: Search for the Hippogriff (Universal Studios Hollywood, Universal Fan Fest Nights, 2026).

The Sociocultural Impact

The success of Harry Potter tourism has significant implications for tourism management. It has been demonstrated that narrative can exponentially increase a site’s economic value. The “Harry Potter Effect” has led to major successes in book publishing, movies, and video games. It is also credited with contributing billions to the tourism economy in the UK and abroad. For example, the studio tour in London alone has surpassed $1B in revenue (Reid, 2024), and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter lands at the Universal parks have led to massive attendance and revenue growth (Reid, 2026).   

Beyond the economic value, this phenomenon can have socio-psychological relevance. It highlights the impact of pop culture and nostalgia as motivators for tourism. As the original Harry Potter audience has grown older, the demographic of Harry Potter tourists has shifted from children to adults with disposable income who want to revisit their childhood fantasies through travel. This desire to relive cherished past experiences (Holbrook, 1993) is supported by the hospitality industry, which offers attractions, themed hotel suites, peer-to-peer lodging, and wizard-themed afternoon teas. This transformation turns the literary symbol into a lifestyle brand.

As in other forms of media tourism, interest in fictional worlds drives tourism to real places. Irimiás et al. (2021), elaborating on the concept of narrative transportation, posited a process where someone consumes media, experiences escapism and immersion, and then converts this into real-world travel intention. Within the most immersive Harry Potter-based sites, the cycle is completed by real-world visitor attractions that enable deep levels of immersion, exploration, and participation. Trips to these tourist locations can be viewed as pilgrimage sites for fans, in which popular culture sites can take on elements of the sacred (Seaton et al., 2017).

Moreover, Foucault’s (1967) theory of heterotopia offers a sociological lens to observe this phenomenon. Harry Potter-related sites function as sophisticated ‘other spaces’ that exist beyond the boundaries of mundane reality. These locations serve as effectively enacted utopias, where the narrative’s imaginative ideals are physically manifested. These sites exemplify the thin distinction between the ideal and the possible by creating utilitarian places that coexist with the narrative, creating a physical point of tension between the real and the imaginary.

Harry Potter tourism is more than a commercial byproduct of a successful franchise; it is a sophisticated model of how contemporary society consumes space through the lens of media. By bridging the gap between traditional heritage and modern entertainment, the ‘Wizarding World’ has redefined the spatial boundaries of the imagination, proving that meaningful experiences can be found at the intersection of the real and the magical for the modern tourist.

How to cite this entry: Tkatch, J.R.V. & Baker, C. (2026). Harry Potter tourism. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

References

Croy, G. ([2013] 2021). Literary Tourism. In P. Robinson (Ed.), Tourism: The key concepts. Routledge.

Dunn, T. (2024). Film tourism. EBSCO. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/film/film-tourism#film-tourism

McCabe, B. (2011). Harry Potter: Page to screen, the complete filmmaking journey. Harper.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. (n.d.). Your experience. https://uk.harrypottertheplay.com/your-experience/

Heitmann, S. (2010). Film tourism planning and development—Questioning the role of stakeholders and sustainability. Tourism and Hospitality Planning & Development, 7(1), 31–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790530903522606

Holbrook, M. (1993). Nostalgia and consumption preferences: Some emerging patterns of consumer tastes. Journal of Consumer Research, 20(2), 245–256.

Irimías, A., Mitev, A.T., & Michalkó, G. (2021). Narrative transportation and travel: The mediating role of escapism and immersion. Tourism Management Perspectives, 38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tmp.2021.100793

Reid, C. (2024, April 25). Harry Potter tour revenue surges past $1 Billion. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2024/04/25/harry-potter-tour-revenue-surges-past-1-billion/

Reid, C. (2026, May 31). Trade body reveals the theme park with the highest attendance growth. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2026/05/31/trade-body-reveals-the-theme-park-with-the-highest-attendance-growth-and-it-isnt-disney/

Seaton, P., Yamamura, T., Sugawa-Shimada, A., & Jang, K. (2017). Contents tourism in Japan: Pilgrimages to ‘sacred sites’ of popular culture. Cambria Press.

Women Writers’ House Museums in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain

Joëlle Saliba (University of Pau and the Adour Region, France, University of Turin, Italy)

While writers’ house museums are a well-established category of literary tourism, they remain profoundly marked by gender inequality. Among the hundreds of writer house museums that have been identified across France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, very few are dedicated to the lives and work of women writers, so few that they can be enumerated within a single dictionary entry. The ones that exist and that have been open to the public – regularly or occasionally – in the last thirty years or so, fall under two categories:  on the one hand, the house museum that bears the name of a woman writer and in which she is a central figure, on the other hand, the house museum dedicated to writer couples, the illustrious husband’s memory usually eclipsing that of his wife. In that sense, the spatial invisibility mirrors the historical invisibility that women writers have suffered throughout the centuries.

This dictionary entry presents an overview of women writers’ house museums in the aforementioned European countries, while reflecting on the tension between domesticity and creativity as well as the parallel narratives within the house. A thorough visit to the website of the French federation of writers’ houses and literary heritage (Fédération nationale des maisons d’écrivains et patrimoines littéraires) reveals that, out of the 185 places listed as writer houses in France, only twelve are monographic women writers’ house museums. Madame de Sévigné (1626-1696) and George Sand (1804-1876) each have two houses attached to their names. It is also the case for Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987), one house dedicated to her memory can be found in the French Flanders, on the border with Belgium. Another, dubbed “Petite Plaisance”, is located in Maine (USA) where she lived with her partner Grace Frick between 1950 and 1987. The other monographic house museums celebrate the lives and work of Colette (1873-1954), Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969), Marie Noël (1883-1967), Andrée Brunin (1937-1993), Catherine Paysan (1926-2020), Madame de Staël (1766-1817) and Camille Aubaude (1959-). In Italy, the National Association of houses of Memory (Associazione Nazionale Case della Memoria) presents the house of Maria Montessori (1870-1952) and that of writer and Holocaust survivor Elisa Springer (1918-2004) in the “writers and poets” section whereas no house museum solely celebrating a woman writer can be found on the website of the Spanish association of house museums and Writer Foundations (Asociación de Casas-Museo y Fundaciones de Escritores) neither on the website of the Portuguese association of house museums (Associação Portuguesa de Casas-Museu). At the regional level, two such house museums exist in Galicia, in northwest Spain, and are listed on the website of the Spanish Ministry of Culture: Casa-Museo Rosalía de Castro and Casa-Museo Emilia Pardo Bazán. In Catalonia, the private non-profit association Written Spaces. Catalan Literary Heritage Network (Espais Escrits. Xarxa del Patrimoni Literari Català) created a literary map, embedding Catalan writers within their home region or tracing their footsteps across the world. Among the 118 writers “located” on the map, 19 are women. It is interesting to note that Caterina Albert, whose name nowadays appears on the map, used to write under the pseudonym Víctor Català. After having scandalised the jury of a literary prize she won, she decided to hide behind that name. Thus, she was able to create a place for herself within the literary scene at the time and, subsequently, within literary heritage.

In the last twenty years, the Regional Delegation of Culture in the North of Portugal has worked on the project “Viajar com…Os Caminhos da Literatura” (“Travelling with… The Ways of Literature”), publishing a collection of books that allow readers to follow in the footsteps of emblematic Portuguese writers. The collection currently comprises twenty-one volumes, four of which present the lives, works, homes, and other relevant spaces of Augusta Bessa-Luís (1922-2019), Maria Ondina Braga (1922-2003), Luísa Decosta (1927-2015), and Florbela Espanca (1894-1930). The house where the latter was born, located in Vila Viçosa (Alentejo, Portugal), is currently being brought back to life by Angolan artist Kina Maua N’Pango through guided visits, artist residencies and a poetry festival. It is worth noting that Vila Viçosa is not the only town relevant to Florbela Espanca’s biography. A Master’s project by Beatriz Martins delves into the relationship that linked the forgotten author to the coastal city of Matosinhos, “a locale of paramount significance in both her personal and artistic realms”, while also exploring the “interplay between poetry and feminism” (2024, p. 67).

Unlike statues, libraries, streets or squares that simply display the name of a writer, house museums and the literary trails in which some are inscribed, develop emplaced narratives (Rule, 2018, p. 404)that demonstrate the “material existence” of writers (Watson, 2023, p. 31), facilitating identification with them as individuals but also raising awareness about the social conditions that affected their work. This is especially relevant from a gender perspective: George Sand (1804-1876) used to write from midnight until four in the morning, not because inspiration struck during the night, but because her children and guests would be asleep (Emery, 2019, p. 121). For Grazia Deledda (1871-1936), Sardinian writer and winner of the 1926 literature Nobel Prize, the childhood house, located in Nuoro (Sardinia, Italy), was the place where a little girl became a writer, but where reading was done in secret because it was not considered “a feminine activity” (Petrignani, 2002, p. 21). Another noteworthy example from Italy is the room of the poet Alda Merini (1931-2009), reconstructed in a former tabacherria, not far from the apartment she used to rent, in the Navigli neighbourhood (southwest Milan). The small space, overflowing with objects, where an unmade bed is covered in dresses and wilted roses, reflects the contrast between her unexpected rise to fame and her struggles with mental health. According to poet Alberto Casiraghi, who was interviewed in 2018 by Alessia Zinnari, “her chaotic lifestyle was not only due to her lack of money, or to her mental illness, but it was the result of Merini’s deliberate refusal to assume once again the role of the housewife.” (2023, p. 8). In this case, personal space becomes a feminist manifesto, and objects take on a dimension specific to women’s social conditions and what is often expected of them.

When it comes to the case of writer couples, the name of the house can be misleading on two levels: either it only refers to the famous husband, or it refers to both the man and the woman writer, but the visitor then discovers that the latter is absent from the house’s narrative. The name becomes an indicator of a power struggle, and rethinking it would be the first step to reinstating women in the houses they inhabited, not only as wives and/or mothers but also as authors and/or translators. There are notable exceptions in which the literary couple is the very foundation of the house as a museum, and the narrative reflects the name. These are due to a conscious curatorial choice, like in the cases of Maison Elsa Triolet-Aragon in Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines (France) and the house of painters and poets Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning in Huismes (France). Some others are due to the request of the writer: Andalusian poet Juan Ramón Jiménez specifically wished that the name of writer Zenobia Camprubí (his wife) appear before his own in the House museum’s name, prompting the group who endeavoured to pay tribute to the exiled poet to acknowledge the literary legacy of his life partner. House museum monikers like “Villa Arnaga-Musée Edmond Rostand” (Cambo-les-Bains, France), “Maison Armand Gatti” (Montreuil, France) or “Casa Miguel Torga” (Coimbra, Portugal) give the impression that only one writer inhabited the space when in reality there is a spouse whose literary work merits a narrative of its own. Indeed, Rosemonde Gérard (1871-1953), Hélène Châtelain (1935-2020) and Andrée Crabbé Rocha (1917-2003) have had literary careers that are significant and yet overshadowed by the respective legacies of Edmond Rostand, Armand Gatti and Miguel Torga.

In a 2002 article, Linda Young states that “there are very few houses presenting much beyond conventional references to women in kitchens, drawing rooms, bedrooms and nurseries”. Since then, there have been some efforts by writer house museums to reconsider their narratives (Bideran, 2025, p. 199). In 2024, Villa Arnaga or Musée Edmond Rostand organised a temporary exhibition dedicated to Rosemonde Gérard. A conference soon followed, in October of the same year, organised by the University of Pau in partnership with the house museum, the town of Cambo-les-Bains and the association “Amis d’Arnaga”. Different aspects of her literary background and production were examined, including her role in helping Edmond Rostand write and edit his plays. She is usually portrayed as the devoted wife who put her literary career on hold to support her famous husband.

One of the myths that writers’ house museums construct is that of the author as a solitary genius who works in isolation. Introducing the woman as a writer inside these places of memory is sure to alter the perception of “genius” as being an occult and impenetrable force, reserved for the “Grand écrivain”. In that sense, the writers’ house museum can serve as a means to question gender bias in literary history and to understand how most women were denied literary recognition during their lifetimes and/or posthumously. It can also be a witness to the creative dynamics within writer couples and a guardian of women’s literary heritage.

How to cite this dictionary entry: Saliba, J. (2026). Women writers’ house museums in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

References

Asociación de Casas-Museo y Fundaciones de Escritores. https://www.museosdeescritores.com

Associação Portuguesa de Casas-Museu. https://www.apcm.pt

Associazione Nazionale Case della Memoria. https://www.casedellamemoria.it/it/

Bideran, J. D. (2025). Rosemonde Gérard, femme poète de la Belle Époque à la Villa Arnaga : Absence et présence muséographique d’une poétesse. Culture & musées, 46, 198‑207. https://doi.org/10.4000/159cr

Espais Escrits. Xarxa del Patrimoni Literari Català. https://www.espaisescrits.cat/ca

Fédération nationale des maisons d’écrivains et patrimoines littéraires.  https://litterature-lieux.com/fr

Martins, B., & Pascoal, S. (s. d.). Voices of Empowerment: A Feminist Literary Tour Through Matosinhos, Exploring Florbela Espanca’s Poetry. LIT&TOUR – International Journal of Literature and Tourism Research, 3, 66‑76.

Petrignani, S. (2003). La scrittrice abita qui (7th ed.). Neri Pozza Ed. https://archive.org/details/lascrittriceabit0000petr/page/226/mode/2up

Watson, N. J. (2023). The author’s effects: On writer’s house museums. Oxford University Press.

Young, L. (2002). A woman’s place is in the house…museum. Open Museum Journal, 5, 1‑24.

Zinnari, A. (2023). Alda Merini: Stigma and the Struggle for Authority as a Woman Writer. In S. Hecker & C. Ramsey-Portolano (Eds.), Female Cultural Production in Modern Italy (p. 173‑187). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14816-3_11

Vinicius de Moraes’ Literary Places

Alberto Roiphe (Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

Born on October 19, 1913, at 114 Lopes Quintas Street, in the Gávea neighbourhood, next to his maternal grandfather’s country house, the poet, columnist, playwright, film critic, and lyricist of Bossa Nova songs Vinicius de Moraes lived in several areas of the city of Rio de Janeiro in addition to this address.

Between 1916 and 1922, the family moved several times within the Botafogo neighbourhood, making it possible to trace an itinerary through the poet’s childhood and adolescence: 192 Voluntários da Pátria Street; 100 Passagem Street (while he attended the Afrânio Peixoto primary school, located on Matriz Street); 127 19 de Fevereiro Street; 130 Real Grandeza Street; 195 Voluntários da Pátria Street; until the family relocated to Ilha do Governador, at 109-A Cocotá Beach, according to the chronology outlined by the literary critic Eucanaã Ferraz (Moraes, 2004, p. 51).

Vinicius de Moraes, however, maintained his ties with the Botafogo neighbourhood, receiving his first communion there in 1923, at the parish church on Voluntários da Pátria Street. Soon afterward, he began his secondary education in 1924 at Santo Inácio School, located on São Clemente Street, where he joined the choir and started writing, in collaboration with classmates, the epic The Academics (Os acadêmicos) and songs such as “Blonde or Brunette” (“Loura ou morena”) and “Song of the Night” (“Canção da noite”), considered his first literary productions and equally important references in an itinerary through the neighbourhood. At this same institution, in 1929, he completed his studies in Languages and Literature (Moraes, 2004, p. 52). That same year, the family left Ilha do Governador and returned to the residence adjacent to his birthplace on Lopes Quintas Street, which has since been demolished.

The itinerary extends to the Catete neighbourhood, where the poet attended law school during the 1930s, on Catete Street itself, a period in which he also published his first book, The Path to the Distance (O caminho para a distância). His productions expanded, and the itinerary expanded even further in the following decades, considering the creation of his first samba, both lyrics and melody, “When You Pass by Me” (“Quando tu passas por mim”), and the play Orpheus of the Conception (Orfeu da Conceição), written in partnership with Antônio Carlos Jobim and staged at the Municipal Theatre of Rio de Janeiro, another site in the city that can still be visited today.

In partnership with Antônio Carlos Jobim, and with the participation of singer and guitarist João Gilberto, Vinicius de Moraes helped launch the movement that renewed Brazilian popular music and became known internationally as Bossa Nova, whose inaugural landmark was the samba “Enough of Longing” (“Chega de Saudade”) [Although this song became internationally known as “No More Blues,” the translation “Enough of Longing” is adopted here to preserve the semantic meaning of the Portuguese title].

In the 1960s, he moved from the Copacabana neighbourhood to Gávea, Jardim Botânico, Leblon, and Ipanema (Campos, 2013; Homem & La Rosa, 2013). During this period, in collaboration with guitarist and composer Baden Powell, he began the series of Afro-Sambas, including “Berimbau” and “Ossanha’s Chant” (“Canto de Ossanha”) (Homem & La Rosa, 2013, p. 188).

Because of his many relocations, the poet described himself as “a nomad, due to the contingencies of his profession” (Rangel, 2021, p. 85, my translation).

Considering the different perspectives on museums and literary houses, it is important to revisit the origins of “Casa di Vina,” the poet’s residence in Salvador, Bahia. The name, given to Vinicius de Moraes’s home by his friends, referred to the house where the poet lived with actress Gessy Gesse during the 1970s, in the Itapoã neighbourhood. Vinicius himself, however, called the residence the “Free and Autonomous Principality of Itapuã” (Principado Livre e Autônomo de Itapuã) (Roiphe, 2024). Transformed into a hotel in 2000, when the house was incorporated into the neighbouring property, the site now houses the Casa di Vina Memorial, which is open to the public and preserves personal objects, photographs of the couple, and some of the poet’s compositions.

It is in Rio de Janeiro that a large part of his manuscripts and sound recordings are preserved, particularly at the Rui Barbosa House Foundation (Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa) and at the Museum of Image and Sound (Museu da Imagem e do Som).

Vinicius de Moraes’s biography also includes important works that reveal the relationship between his creative process and urban spaces. One of them is the film about the life of the artist Antônio Francisco Lisboa, known as Aleijadinho, produced by the poet in 1952 in collaboration with his cousins Humberto and José Francheschi, following an itinerary through the historic cities of Minas Gerais where the sculptor’s works are located. Another work is the symphonic poem Symphony of Dawn (Sinfonia da Alvorada), composed by Antônio Carlos Jobim in tribute to Brasília, the new capital of Brazil, inaugurated in 1960, for which Vinicius wrote the lyrics. Another particularly significant work is Lyrical and Sentimental Guide to the City of São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro (Roteiro lírico e sentimental da Cidade de São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro), a collection of texts devoted specifically to Rio de Janeiro. Although written by the poet, the manuscript was lost on an aeroplane in 1979 while he was returning from a trip to Europe (Homem & La Rosa, 2013, p. 191). The work was later published posthumously and only in part, in an edition organised by the literary critic José Castello.

While the city of Rio de Janeiro permeates his entire oeuvre, this work presents a sequence of poems that reveal places the poet frequented. Among them is “Lopes Quintas (the street where I was born)” (“Lopes Quintas (a rua onde nasci)”), which mentions his grandfather’s house in the Gávea neighbourhood. Another poem is “The Lover of the Streets” (“O namorado das ruas”), in which he describes his wanderings through streets bearing female names (Alice, Conceição, Lucília, Bambina, Maria Quitéria…). The final street mentioned in the poem is Joana Angélica, one of his addresses on Ipanema Beach, at the corner of Vieira Souto Avenue, where a commemorative plaque honouring the poet still stands. The work also includes poems dedicated to different neighbourhoods of Rio de Janeiro, frequently portrayed throughout the poet’s oeuvre,  such as “Copacabana,” “Ballad of Botafogo” (“Balada de Botafogo”), “Praia do Pinto,” and “Lapa de Bandeira,” the latter referring to the writer Manuel Bandeira, as well as testimonies by the poet himself about places he frequented: “Villarino, Vermelhinho, Jucas’s Bar, Lamas. Much later, Veloso and Antonio’s Bar. Rio visited through its bohemian bars and restaurants” (Moraes, 2001, p. 90, my translation).

These latter references are essential to understanding the creative process not only of the poet, who also worked as a diplomat, but also of the intellectual and artistic circles with whom he interacted, including writers such as Rubem Braga and Moacyr Werneck de Castro, as well as young architects and visual artists of the period, among them Oscar Niemeyer, Carlos Leão, Afonso Reidy, Jorge Moreira, José Reis, Alfredo Ceschiatti, Santa Rosa, Pancetti, Augusto Rodrigues, Djanira, and Bruno Giorgi. Both Casa Villarino, located at the corner of Calógeras Avenue and Presidente Wilson Avenue in downtown Rio de Janeiro, and Café Lamas, on Marquês de Abrantes Street in the Flamengo neighbourhood, still exist today. Regarding Antonio’s specifically, formerly located on Bartolomeu Mitre Street in the Leblon neighbourhood, Paulo Mendes Campos observes that it “was the third home (for some, the second) of the group (…) Literature: Braga, Sabino, Carlinhos de Oliveira. And it was there that the musicians (Tom, Chico, Toquinho, and all the others) would meet Vinicius” (Campos, 2013, p. 220, my translation). In this sense, the venue itself became an integral part of the creative process of its regular patrons.

Among these spaces is also the Garota [de Ipanema] restaurant, located at 49 Vinicius de Moraes Street, today named in honour of the poet. In The History of Rio de Janeiro (A História do Rio de Janeiro), Armelle Enders recounts that “in 1963, Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, seated at a table in the Velloso bar, on Montenegro Street in Ipanema, paid tribute through a song to Heloísa Eneida Paes Pinto Mendes Pinheiro, known as Helô Pinheiro. This was “The Girl from Ipanema” (“Garota de Ipanema”), described as “the object of thousands of versions in every language and rhythm around the world, and which lent its name to the Velloso bar, on the street that, since the poet’s death, has been called Vinicius de Moraes Street” (Enders, 2015, p. 274, my translation).

Retracing an author’s creative itinerary, including the houses, cafés, restaurants, and other places they frequented, seems, in terms of literary tourism, to help bridge the gap between the moment of literary creation and the moment of reading. As João Adolfo Hansen (2019) argues, this process involves the recognition of symbolic conventions, the appropriation of the cultural realities embedded in the text, the formulation of hypotheses, the examination of different structures and styles of literary genres, and the observation of norms of social regulation, among many other interpretative practices performed by active readers.

How to cite this entry: Roiphe, A. (2026). Vinicius de Moraes’ Literary Places. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

References

Campos, P. M. (2013). O mais estranho dos países: Crônicas e perfis. Companhia das Letras.

Enders, A. (2015). A história do Rio de Janeiro (3rd ed.). Gryphus.

Hansen, J. A. (2019). O que é um livro? Ateliê Editorial & Sesc.

Homem, W., & La Rosa, B. de. (2013). Histórias de canções: Vinicius de Moraes. Leya.

Moraes, V. de. (2001). Roteiro lírico e sentimental da cidade do Rio de Janeiro e outros lugares por onde passou e se encantou o poeta (J. Castello, Ed.). Companhia das Letras.

Moraes, V. de. (2004). Poesia completa e prosa (4th ed., E. Ferraz, Ed.). Nova Aguilar.

Rangel, M. L. (Ed.). (2021). Vinicius por Vinicius: Um retrato em 150 frases. Companhia das Letras.

Roiphe, A. (2024). Turismo literário: Sobre cidades e escritores. Folhas de Relva.

César Vallejo in Paris

Otto Regalado-Pezúa (Universidad ESAN, Peru)

Vallejo’s literary approach to Paris: César Vallejo (Santiago de Chuco, Peru, 1892 – Paris, 1938), regarded as one of the most innovative figures in Spanish-language literature, lived in the French capital from July 1923 until his death on 15 April 1938. Vallejo arrived in the French capital as a correspondent for the Trujillo-based newspaper El Norte, with limited financial resources. It was there that he wrote the works that established him as one of the most universal 20th-century Spanish poets: Poemas humanos and España, aparta de mí este cáliz, both of which were published posthumously in 1939. For Vallejo, Paris was more than just a place of residence: it was the substance of his writing, the setting for his intellectual reflection, and the space where his Andean and Peruvian heritage met European modernity. This convergence makes the city a unique destination for literary tourism, capable of connecting visitors to a creative trajectory that belongs simultaneously to two cultural traditions (Butler, 2000).

Paris as a literary space and experience: The Latin Quarter and Montparnasse neighbourhoods form the core of Vallejo’s Parisian cartography. It was in these streets that the poet lived at various times during his stay, in modest flats on the Rue du Cherche-Midi (6th arrondissement), the Rue de Bretagne (3rd arrondissement), and the Rue Bonaparte (6th arrondissement), among other addresses documented by López Álvarez (1988) and Meneses (2005). Visitors exploring these neighbourhoods today can trace the settings of a daily life marked by economic precariousness, intellectual intensity, and the observation of modern urban life; the tension between the grandeur of the European cultural capital and the actual living conditions of the immigrant poet is one of the threads that literary tourism can recover in these spaces. In one of his columns for the magazine Mundial, he ironically debunked the image his compatriots had formed of the city before visiting it: “Everything in Paris is within the bounds of logic and reason or within what has already been seen in other cities. Nothing in Paris is out of the ordinary” (Vallejo, 1928, as cited in Ortiz Canseco, 2014, p. 364). This act of demystifying the Western metropolis, written from within it, defines the perspective with which Vallejo inhabited these neighbourhoods and which the visitor can rediscover whilst exploring them.

The cafés on the Boulevard de Montparnasse are one of the focal points of Vallejo’s literary itinerary in Paris. La Rotonde, Le Select, and La Coupole were regular venues for the gatherings that brought together Latin American and European writers, artists, and thinkers during the interwar years. In these spaces, Vallejo crossed paths with figures such as Pablo Neruda and Juan Larrea, and took part in the debates on art, politics, and revolution that characterised the intellectual life of the period. Meneses (2005) highlights the role of these cafés in shaping his political thought, which from the late 1920s onwards shifted towards a committed Marxism.

One of Vallejo’s most original contributions to Parisian literary tourism is the body of articles and chronicles he sent to the Peruvian press over more than a decade, texts that today serve as a critical and intimate guide to the modern city. Published in El Norte, Mundial, Variedades, and El Comercio, these chronicles describe the urban settings Vallejo frequented: the boulevards, cinemas, and working-class neighbourhoods (Ortiz Canseco, 2014). The poet did not merely describe; he analysed and questioned the phenomena of capitalist modernity from a Latin American perspective, endowing his texts with extraordinary originality and relevance. Writing about speed as a hallmark of modern man, he asserted: “Speed is the hallmark of modern man. No one can call themselves modern without showing themselves to be fast” (Vallejo, 1925, as cited in Ortiz Canseco, 2014, p. 365). Visitors who read these chronicles whilst walking the same boulevards as Vallejo gain access to a layer of meaning that transforms the sightseeing stroll into a specialised reading experience.

The poems Vallejo composed in Paris bear the city’s mark in diverse and often unexpected ways. Poemas humanos, the most extensive collection of his Parisian output, is permeated by images of modern urban life, illness, human solidarity, and an awareness of the passage of time. In one of the poems later included in that volume, the poet condensed the rhythm of modern daily life into a synthesis of images (Ortiz Canseco, 2014). For its part, “España, aparta de mí este cáliz” was written in Paris during the years of the Spanish Civil War, when Vallejo actively participated in the movement of solidarity with the Republic. The link between the French city and the Spanish historical drama is central to this collection of poems, which transforms Paris into a space of pain and political commitment as well as literary creation; for the visitor, discovering the places where these texts were born adds a concrete dimension to the reading experience, anchoring the poems in the physical space of the city.

Memory, death and literary tourism: The main attraction for Vallejo-themed literary tourism in Paris is Montparnasse Cemetery, where the poet is buried. Vallejo’s grave is visited every year by readers, students, and researchers from across the Spanish-speaking world, in a practice combining literary homage and emotional engagement with the place (Magadán Díaz & Rivas García, 2010). This form of visit falls within what Baleiro (2023) defines as dark literary tourism, visits to places associated with death mediated by literary texts. In Vallejo’s case, this dimension is intensified by the poem Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca, written in Paris shortly before his death, in which the poet foreshadowed his passing: “I shall die in Paris in a downpour, on a day of which I already have a memory”. Vallejo’s death on 15 April 1938 at Lariboisière Hospital (10th arrondissement) adds historical and literary significance to the visit.

Beyond the cemetery, the Vallejo literary itinerary in Paris includes other sites of memory for visitors to explore. Among these, the Lariboisière Hospital (10th arrondissement) stands out as the place where Vallejo died (Hart, 2014). This literary itinerary also includes the Sainte-Geneviève Library in the Latin Quarter, a space for study and reading, and the headquarters of Les Grands Journaux Iberoaméricains, where he worked from 1925 onwards.

Each of these spaces adds a layer of meaning to the overall experience; it is not merely a matter of visiting places where Vallejo created his works, but of tracing the entirety of an urban life marked by hardship, creative tenacity, and a critical view of the modern world (Meneses, 2005). Visitors exploring his Parisian haunts gain access not merely to a European literary heritage but to a legacy that bridges two cultural worlds and reveals, through the experience of the place, the links between Latin American history and the intellectual history of Europe in the 20th century.

In short, Vallejo’s Paris is a city to be read. The chronicles the poet sent to the Peruvian press from the cafés of Montparnasse, the poems he wrote in his apartments in the Latin Quarter, and the testimonies of those who knew him in those years form a textual network that the visitor can activate by walking through the same spaces. This capacity of Vallejo’s texts to transform the visitor’s experience, turning a stroll into a literary one, defines the specificity of the literary tourism associated with his figure. At Montparnasse Cemetery, before a grave that the poet prophesied in verse, the experience reaches its greatest intensity: the distance between the world of the text and the world of the place narrows until it almost vanishes. More than eight decades after his death in Paris, Vallejo’s work and life continue to offer literary tourism a rich experience: that of a poet who, having arrived from the Andean periphery of the Hispanic world, made the French capital the setting for a body of writing capable of speaking simultaneously of a specific place and of the human condition in its entirety.

How to cite this entry: Regalado-Pezúa, O. (2026). César Vallejo in Paris. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

References

Baleiro, R. (2023). Dark literary tourism. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.). E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

Butler, R. (2000). Literary tourism. Working definitions in literature and tourism. A Research Guide. In S. Quinteiro & M.J. Marques (Eds.). LIT&TOUR.

Ortiz Canseco M. (2014). Crónicas desde París: modernidad y capitalismo en César Vallejo. Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana, 43, 359-376. https://doi.org/10.5209/rev_ALHI.2014.v43.47129

Hart, S. M. (2014). César Vallejo: Una biografía literaria. Editorial Cátedra Vallejo.

López Álvarez, L. (1988). César Vallejo en París. Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos. Homenaje a César Vallejo, 2(456-457), 1057–1063. https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/cesar-vallejo-en-paris/

Magadán Díaz, M., & Rivas García, J. (2010). Turismo Literario. Septem Ediciones.

Meneses, C. (2005). Vallejo, el placer de vivir en París. In La literatura hispanoamericana con los cinco sentidos. V Congreso internacional de la AEELH (pp. 419–425). Universidad da Coruña. http://hdl.handle.net/2183/11384

Reijnders, S. (2011). Stalking the Count: Dracula, Fandom and Tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 38(1), 231–248. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2010.08.006

Literary Tourism in the Canary Islands: Writers, Landscapes and Peripheral Spaces, focusing on the cases of Miguel de Unamuno and Agatha Christie

Elena María Pérez González (Universidad Europea de Canarias, Spain)

The Canary Islands constitute a singular context for literary tourism, shaped by their insular condition, peripheral position within Europe, and long-standing role as a space of passage, exile, and temporary residence for writers. Unlike metropolitan literary destinations structured around dense institutional networks, literary tourism in the Canary Islands has developed in a fragmented and uneven manner, combining formal literary sites with non-institutionalised literary presences linked to landscape, travel, and personal experience.

Literary tourism in the archipelago is closely connected to the relationship between writers and the island landscape. The volcanic terrain, the Atlantic environment, and the experience of isolation or distance from continental centres have recurrently influenced literary production and memory. In this sense, the Canary Islands function not only as settings for literary creation but also as cultural landscapes where writing, place, and biography intersect, an approach that has been highlighted in research on literary tourism and its connections with landscape and place (Arcos-Pumarola et al., 2020).

Two contrasting yet complementary cases illustrate these dynamics particularly well: Miguel de Unamuno’s exile in Fuerteventura and Agatha Christie’s stays in the islands.

Miguel de Unamuno was exiled to Fuerteventura in 1924 by the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. During his confinement on the island, Unamuno produced a significant body of reflective writing in which landscape, solitude, and political dissent converge. His work De Fuerteventura a París (1925) offers a literary interpretation of the island as a space of introspection and resistance, transforming Fuerteventura into a symbolic territory within Spanish literary history. Today, the Casa-Museo Unamuno in Puerto del Rosario represents the most institutionalised form of literary tourism associated with the author in the Canary Islands. The house preserves documents, personal objects, and interpretative materials related to his stay, situating Unamuno’s exile within its historical and political context.

The Casa-Museo Unamuno exemplifies a low-intensity model of an author’s house museum, characterised by limited visitor numbers, strong educational orientation, and close integration with the local cultural fabric. Unlike large literary museums in urban centres, its appeal lies less in spectacle than in authenticity and contextualisation. Literary tourists visiting the site are invited to engage with the relationship between writing, exile, and landscape, rather than with a monumentalised image of the author. This model aligns with broader trends in sustainable cultural tourism, in which literary heritage is embedded in local narratives and everyday spaces.

In contrast to this institutionalised site, Agatha Christie’s presence in the Canary Islands represents a form of literary tourism based on non-monumental traces and biographical memory. Christie visited the archipelago in the late 1920s, staying in Tenerife and Gran Canaria during a period of personal crisis. Although the islands do not feature explicitly as settings in her novels, Christie’s stay forms part of a wider narrative of travel, healing, and creative transition that has attracted growing interest among literary tourists.

Agatha Christie’s literary tourism in the Canary Islands is not centred on a house museum or a single physical site, but rather on hotels, landscapes, and routes associated with her travels. This type of literary tourism relies on storytelling, interpretation, and guided experiences rather than on preserved literary heritage buildings. It illustrates how literary tourism can emerge from temporary presence and experiential narratives, expanding the concept of literary place beyond fixed locations.

Together, the cases of Unamuno and Christie highlight the diversity of literary tourism practices in the Canary Islands. Although hybrid forms combining institutional heritage management with informal, experience-based interpretations can also be found in non-peripheral and non-insular contexts, in the Canary Islands, this hybridity acquires a specific meaning. It is shaped by insularity, fragmented cultural governance, discontinuous literary heritage initiatives and the central role of landscape in mediating literary memory. The archipelago, therefore, illustrates how literary tourism may operate in peripheral spaces through a combination of authors’ house museums, biographical traces, hotels, routes, festivals and landscape-based storytelling.

Beyond these international figures, the Canary Islands possess a rich literary tradition that remains only partially integrated into literary tourism strategies. Authors such as Benito Pérez Galdós, Tomás Morales, Alonso Quesada, Mercedes Pinto, María Rosa Alonso, Pedro García Cabrera, Josefina de la Torre and Rafael Arozarena offer particularly relevant possibilities for the development of literary routes, interpretative materials and place-based cultural experiences. Their works engage with questions of island identity, Atlantic imagination, social change, exile, gender, modernity and landscape. Although some authors are commemorated through museums, archives or cultural institutions, their incorporation into broader literary tourism narratives remains uneven across the archipelago. This underdevelopment points to a wider challenge: the need to move from isolated commemorative initiatives towards integrated literary tourism strategies capable of connecting local writers, island landscapes and contemporary cultural interpretation.

Recent research has emphasised the potential of cultural tourism to engage with intangible heritage, storytelling, place-making and the relationship between visitors and local communities (Richards, 2025). In the specific field of literary tourism, recent work has also shown how literary landscapes can contribute to cultural sustainability, collective memory and the diversification of local tourism economies (Rech et al., 2025). In this context, literary tourism in the Canary Islands offers an alternative approach to cultural tourism, emphasising slowness, interpretation and landscape-based experience. Rather than competing with large-scale tourism destinations, literary tourism initiatives may help diversify the cultural offering and foster more reflective forms of engagement with place. The Canary Islands thus exemplify how literary tourism can operate in peripheral spaces, drawing on biography, landscape and memory to construct meaningful cultural experiences beyond canonical literary centres.

How to cite this entry: Pérez González, E. M. (2026). Literary Tourism in the Canary Islands: Writers, Landscapes and Peripheral Spaces, focusing on the cases of Miguel de Unamuno and Agatha Christie. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

References

Agatha Christie Festival Internacional (n.d.). Festival Internacional Agatha Christie – Puerto de la Cruz. https://agathachristiefestival.es/es/

Arcos-Pumarola, J., Marzal, E. O., & Llonch-Molina, N. (2020). Revealing the literary landscape: Research lines and challenges of literary tourism studies. Enlightening Tourism. A Pathmaking Journal, 10(2), 179–205.

Christie, A. (1977). An autobiography. Collins.

Herbert, D. (2001). Literary places, tourism and the heritage experience. Annals of Tourism Research, 28(2), 312–333.

Museos Fuerteventura (n.d.). Casa Museo Unamuno (Casa Museum Unamuno). https://museosfuerteventura.com/en/museos/casa-museo-unamuno/

Pillet Capdepón, F. (2014). El paisaje literario y su relación con el turismo cultural. Cuadernos de Turismo, 33, 297–309.

Rech, G., Pini, C., Migliorati, L., & Mori, L. (2025). Literary tourism and cultural sustainability: The landscape of Beppe Fenoglio in the Langhe, Italy. Sustainability, 17(3), 1237. https://doi.org/10.3390/su17031237

Richards, G. (2025). Cultural tourism: An integrative review. Tourism & Management Studies, 21(4). https://doi.org/10.18089/tms.20250402

Robinson, M., & Andersen, H. C. (Eds.). (2002). Literature and tourism: Reading and writing tourism texts. Continuum.

Unamuno, M. de (1925). De Fuerteventura a París. Renacimiento.

Geographies of Literary Tourism

Paulo Fernando Meliani (Santa Catarina State University, Geoprocessing Laboratory – GeoLab, Brazil).

Geographies of Literary Tourism refer to geographical approaches to the socio-spatial processes through which tourism practices connect literary texts, authors, characters and settings to locations, routes and landscapes, turning literary references into meaningful tourist sites. In tourism studies, this set of practices is commonly understood as literary tourism, a field situated within cultural and heritage tourism, in which writers, literary works and fictional worlds draw visitors to author-related sites, textual settings, book towns, festivals and organised tours (Hoppen, Brown, & Fyall, 2014; Çevik, 2020). These practices are geographical because they locate literary references in space, organise them into sites and itineraries, orient modes of visitation, and depend on selective processes of recognition, mediation and territorial valorisation. Geographies of Literary Tourism may be studied through interrelated dimensions, including the spatial distribution of literary references, their organisation into sites and routes, visitor practices and mobilities, the institutional mediation and management of literary places, and the territorial hierarchies produced when literary value is converted into territorial and tourism value.

The spatial distribution of literary tourism concerns where literary references appear and how they concentrate or disperse as identifiable tourist sites. It includes both dense literary clusters, such as cities, neighbourhoods or book towns, and more dispersed points, such as graves, houses, cafés, libraries and landscapes associated with particular texts. Çevik’s review of literary tourism types helps specify this distribution through author-related sites, fictional places, areas associated with literary figures, places made popular by literature, travel writing, film-induced literary tourism, literary festivals and bookshop tourism (Çevik, 2020). These locations, events and environments become literary places when they operate as what Cresswell (2015, p. 12) defines as a “meaningful location”, combining material setting, attachment, experience and shared interpretation. In this sense, distribution is already interpretive, since literary visibility depends on the connection between material location and symbolic association. This distribution gives spatial presence to authors, works and characters through a field of biographical, textual and event-based places that may later be organised into routes, circuits and destinations.   

Literary tourism is spatially organised when places associated with writers, works and characters are connected through routes, maps, guidebooks and digital platforms. This organisation gives order to dispersed literary references and turns them into a spatial structure that visitors can recognise, follow and interpret. Hoppen, Brown, and Fyall (2014) show that guidebooks, literary maps, tourism websites and online route-planning tools help visitors identify literary destinations, bookshops, activities and events, turning dispersed references into possible travel itineraries. Such devices do not simply provide information. They select places, establish connections and frame the way literary space is approached. A route is not simply a line between points; it selects what is relevant, establishes a sequence and offers an interpretation of literary territory. Spatial organisation, therefore, translates a scattered geography of authorial and textual places into visitable itineraries, preparing the movements, gazes and embodied practices through which visitors encounter literary tourism sites.

Visitor practices and mobilities bring literary tourism into action by transforming organised places and routes into situated experiences of movement, looking, reading, affect and imagination. Urry and Larsen (2011) show that the tourist gaze is anticipated and sustained through media such as literature, while also being enacted through embodied and hybrid performances rather than through vision alone. In literary tourism, this means that visitors do not merely observe sites associated with authors or works; they move through them, recognise signs, compare textual expectations with material settings and perform their own relation to literary worlds. Baleiro, Viegas, and Faria (2022) reinforce this point by showing that literary tourism experience emerges from interaction with place, personal literary knowledge, emotions, expectations and imagination. Literary places are therefore experienced as co-produced spaces, where textual memory, bodily movement and interpretive work combine before being stabilised by the institutional mediations examined in the following dimension.

Institutional mediation in literary tourism refers to the set of cultural, heritage and tourism actions that recognise, interpret and manage literary references as tourist sites open to the public. This mediation is geographical because it gives material form and spatial stability to dispersed memories, texts and imaginaries, deciding where they are preserved, displayed, signposted, narrated and connected to local tourism. Strepetova and Arcos-Pumarola (2020) show that literary heritage depends on the relation between intangible meanings and tangible supports, since books, archives, objects, houses, landscapes and exhibitions make authors’ ideas and literary worlds communicable. Museums, writers’ houses, guides, curators, municipalities and tourism bodies therefore transform literary meanings into spatial arrangements by preserving sites, designing exhibitions, guiding visits and promoting routes. These choices define which authors, works and places receive recognition, investment and visibility, opening the question of territorial hierarchies.

Territorial hierarchies emerge when literary value is unevenly translated into tourism visibility, destination image and economic opportunity. This unevenness is not accidental: it reflects the selective capacity of institutions, markets and cultural canons to transform some literary associations into recognised tourism assets while others remain peripheral. Hoppen, Brown, and Fyall (2014) analyse literary tourism as a field of destination marketing and branding, in which authors, works, fictional settings, book-related activities and festivals become resources for tourism products and place promotion. Such conversion gives literature economic and promotional force, but also exposes it to simplification, commodification and selective packaging. Arcos-Pumarola, Osácar Marzal, and Llonch-Molina (2018) add a more critical spatial dimension by arguing that literary landscapes can broaden destination images, reveal less-visited urban areas, and challenge mainstream tourist narratives. These processes select which authors, languages, works, and places receive recognition and investment, converting literature into territorial value while leaving other literary associations marginal, invisible or weakly institutionalised.

Geographical approaches to literary tourism examine the passage from literary reference to spatial practice. Literature enters tourism when texts, authors, characters, and fictional worlds lend symbolic density to locations, making them recognisable as tourist sites. A literary tourism place is produced through the encounter among textual memory, material setting, institutional recognition and visitor performance. This process is selective: some authors, languages, works and places become visible, promoted and visited, while others remain marginal, weakly institutionalised or absent from tourism narratives. Geographies of Literary Tourism offer a critical framework for understanding how literature becomes territorial, how tourism makes this territorialisation visitable, and how places are produced, ordered and disputed through literary imagination.

How to cite this entry: Meliani, P. F. (2026). Geographies of literary tourism. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

References

Arcos-Pumarola, J., Osácar Marzal, E., & Llonch-Molina, N. (2018). Literary urban landscape in a sustainable tourism context. Human Geographies: Journal of Studies and Research in Human Geography, 12(2), 175–189. https://doi.org/10.5719/hgeo.2018.122.3

Baleiro, R., Viegas, M., & Faria, D. (2022). Contributes to the profile of the Brazilian literary tourist: Experience and motivation. Revista Anais Brasileiros de Estudos Turísticos / ABET, 12(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6643908

Çevik, S. (2020). Literary tourism as a field of research over the period 1997–2016. European Journal of Tourism Research, 24, 2407. https://doi.org/10.54055/ejtr.v24i.409

Cresswell, T. (2015). Place: An introduction (2nd ed.). Wiley Blackwell.

Hoppen, A., Brown, L., & Fyall, A. (2014). Literary tourism: Opportunities and challenges for the marketing and branding of destinations? Journal of Destination Marketing & Management, 3(1), 37–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdmm.2013.12.009

Strepetova, M., & Arcos-Pumarola, J. (2020). Literary heritage in museum exhibitions: Identifying its main challenges in the European context. Muzeológia a kultúrne dedičstvo, 8(3), 95–109. https://doi.org/10.46284/mkd.2020.8.3.5

Urry, J., & Larsen, J. (2011). The tourist gaze 3.0. SAGE.

Literary Hotel Room

Anatoly Lvov (University of Eastern-Finland, Finland)

Many writers and poets travelled widely in search of new experiences and inspiration, or simply a change of scenery (Elborough, 2022). Hotels provided temporary shelter on these journeys, and because of these literary authors’ sejours, they became literary tourism attractions. A hotel room is generally defined as a furnished unit in a hotel or similar establishment that offers paid short-term overnight stays and basic guest services (Eurostat, 2025). A hotel, as such, is an architectural whole and a hospitality institution. From a literary perspective, a hotel room can be described as a closed, personalised, and, most importantly, anonymous space. Although any traveller who can afford the accommodation may stay overnight, the room itself has no permanent resident. As van Lennep (1987) notes, hotel rooms are temporary spaces occupied by different guests for short periods and do not create a lasting sense of belonging.  In marketing, a hotel room often becomes a unique point of attraction and experience for customers. Within a literary framework, a hotel room’s meanings go above its practical use. Furthermore, the hotel room itself becomes an object of tourist and cultural interest through its symbolic interpretation.

First of all, a hotel room can be seen as a space of authors’ creativity and inspiration in quietness. From the perspective of literary tourism, hotel rooms associated with writers may be regarded as literary heritage sites, comparable to literary house museums in their biographical and cultural significance (Arcos-Pumarola & Osácar Marzal, 2022). Often, the daily responsibilities and routine activities that come with a permanent residence are absent from a hotel room. Such an environment provides a degree of temporary isolation that supports thinking and writing. In this sense, a hotel room becomes an invisible space between everyday life and the creative process. Once those places get revealed, they lose their anonymity and become cultural and tourist attractions.

This can be further illustrated by the Hemingway Room (511), which is located on the fifth floor of the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana, Cuba. It’s interesting to note that Hemingway chose this particular room because of the great view of Old Havana and the harbour. He regularly stayed there and began working on the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. A hotel room provides a special space for creative concentration and intellectual work. Currently, Room 511 is functioning as a memorial space: the writer’s desk, typewriter, and bed are preserved (Billock, 2019). Moreover, the interior of the room recreates the mood and the atmosphere of the 1930s. Additionally, a peculiar case is Room 552 at The Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh, UK. In that room, the final chapters of the Harry Potter series were written by J.K. Rowling (Rocco Forte Hotels, n.d.-b). Today, the room is officially known as the “J.K. Rowling Suite,” and its literary association is preserved through its naming, interior design, and tourism marketing. This shows how a hotel room came to be recognised as a tangible tribute to authors’ talent.

Several examples highlight how the room can also become a site of interplay between an author’s biography and a literary text. While travelling in the Middle East, Agatha Christie worked on her famous novel Murder on the Orient Express. The text for that breathtaking story was completed in Room 411 of the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, Turkey. Although the room remains in use as a hotel, its literary memory is maintained through décor, historical displays, and promotion as the “Agatha Christie Room” (Pera Palace Hotel, n.d.).The novel itself is closely linked to the culture of travel, trains, and hotels during the interwar period.  Room 217 at The Stanley Hotel is famous for being Stephen King’s 1974 stay and is considered a source of inspiration for his novel The Shining (The Stanley Hotel, n.d.). The isolation, emptiness of the hotel space, and the room’s atmosphere contributed to the novel’s artistic conception. Today, Room 217 is marketed as “King’s room,” with guided narratives and tourism materials connecting the literary imagination to the physical hotel space.

While serving as a writing space for a writer, a hotel room becomes an element of contemporary culture. Vladimir Nabokov and his wife, Vera, lived in Switzerland at the Fairmont Le Montreux Palace hotel from 1960, where the writer spent a significant part of his later life and continued his literary work (Goldman, 2024). Furthermore, hotel rooms get strongly associated with popular literature and the global reading community.

From a historical perspective, hotel rooms can be viewed as a temporary residence for historical figures. With famous guests staying in the hotel, it becomes a cultural and tourist attraction. In this regard, a hotel room serves as a memorial space associated with specific biographical and cultural milestones. For instance, the Hotel Kämp in Helsinki, Finland, is now included in the city’s historical narrative because Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim stayed there (Augustin & Kolbe, 2006). A similar role is played by Brown’s Hotel in London, one of the city’s oldest hotels. It has hosted many writers over the years, including Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and Jorge Luis Borges (Rocco Forte Hotels, n.d.-a).  Through these literary associations, Brown’s Hotel has become a symbolic site of literary heritage and literary tourism.

The hotel room complements and extends the descendants’ understanding of the literature and the historical figure.  Brown’s Hotel is also especially significant because Rudyard Kipling wrote The Jungle Book there. The hotel currently offers the “Kipling Suite,” designed with references to colonial aesthetics and the writer’s literary legacy (Rocco Forte Hotels, n.d.-c). In this regard, a hotel room becomes part of the discourse of biography. Such hotel rooms are connected to the literature through their recognition in the tourism literature, museum exhibitions, and excursion storytelling. As a result, a hotel room becomes a cultural object, imbued with symbolism and historical narrative.

This discussion also highlights that one of the major meanings of a hotel room, as described in the literature, is a space of fictional narrative. The hotel room has characteristics of isolation, anonymity, and temporality. These elements emphasise the dramatic and psychological effects of a narrative. On one hand, a hotel room can be a part of the detective story, as in Agatha Christie’s At Bertram’s Hotel. On the other hand, a hotel room can serve as a setting for risk-taking and moral judgment, as in Irwin Shaw’s Nightwork. In addition, in Stephen King’s short story 1408, the hotel room becomes a space of fear and anxiety. It demonstrates how hotel settings can contribute to atmosphere, symbolism, and plot development. The story 1408 was adapted into a movie of the same title in 2007. In the same way, the story of John le Carré’s novel The Night Manager and its TV adaptation also starts in a hotel room. In these stories, the hotel room serves as a significant setting, and anonymity heightens the stories’ intensity.

To summarise, nowadays hotels are trying to make their rooms special for guests. According to Lvov and Komppula (2024), a hotel room is not just a place to sleep. Rather, it is a space which offers a unique experience. From a literary tourism perspective, hotel rooms associated with writers can be noted through their biographical and creative connections. Hotel rooms offer visitors the opportunity to engage with places associated with authors’ lives and literary production (Hoppen et al., 2014). In this regard, the literary hotel room is used to create a memorable image of the accommodation facility, enhance its cultural identity and increase its tourist attractiveness. However, in the literature context, it acquires additional symbolic meaning. A literary hotel room serves as a creative space in authors’ biographies and as a place of residence for historical figures. Furthermore, a hotel room serves as the main setting in a literary plot, forming the dramatic and symbolic core of a story. Within the context of literary tourism, a hotel room becomes an object of interest for travellers.

How to cite this entry: Lvov, A. (2026). Literary hotel room. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

References

Arcos-Pumarola, J., & Osácar Marzal, E. (2022). Literary tourism products. In D. Buhalis (Ed.), Encyclopedia of tourism management and marketing (pp.80–83). Edward Elgar Publishing.

Augustin, A., & Kolbe, L. (2006). Hotel Kämp – Helsinki, Finland. In The most famous hotels in the world. teNeues.

Billock, J. (2019, October 10). Follow Ernest Hemingway’s footsteps through Havana. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/follow-ernest-hemingways-footsteps-through-havana-180967659/

Elborough, T. (2022). The Writer’s Journey: In the Footsteps of the Literary Greats. White Lion Publishing.

Eurostat (2025). Hotels and similar accommodation. Statistics Explained. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Glossary:Hotels_and_similar_accommodation

Goldman, S. (2024, July 25). Nabokov’s love affair. Tablet Magazine. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/nabokov-love-affair

Hoppen, A., Brown, L. & Fyall, A. (2014). Literary tourism: Opportunities and challenges for the marketing and branding of destinations? Journal of Destination Marketing & Management 3(1), 37–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdmm.2013.12.009

Lvov, A., & Komppula, R. (2024). The essence of the hotel room in the hotel business: The hotel managers’ perspective. European Journal of Tourism Research, 36, 3609. https://doi.org/10.54055/ejtr.v36i.3158

Pera Palace Hotel. (n.d.). Agatha Christie Room – Room 411. Pera Palace Hotel. https://perapalace.com/en/rooms/agatha-christie-room/

Rocco Forte Hotels. (n.d.-a). Brown’s Hotel: 5-star luxury hotel in London. https://www.roccofortehotels.com/hotels-and-resorts/brown-s-hotel/story/

Rocco Forte Hotels. (n.d.-b). J.K. Rowling Suite – The Balmoral Hotel. Rocco Forte Hotels. https://www.roccofortehotels.com/hotels-and-resorts/the-balmoral-hotel/accommodation/jk-rowling-suite 

Rocco Forte Hotels. (n.d.-c). Kipling Suite. Brown’s Hotel. https://www.roccofortehotels.com/hotels-and-resorts/brown-s-hotel/accommodation/kipling-suite/

The Stanley Hotel. (n.d.). Room 217 – The Stanley Hotel. The Stanley Hotel. https://www.stanleyhotel.com/our-properties/room-217

Van Lennep, D. V. (1987). The hotel room. In J.J. Kockelmans (Ed.), Phenomenological Psychology: The Dutch School (pp. 209–215). Springer Netherlands.

The Literary Haunting of Lamb House

Philip Howell (University of Cambridge, UK)

Lamb House, in the English south coast town of Rye, is a place of pilgrimage for readers of Henry James, who lived there from 1898 to a couple of months before his death in 1916, and for those interested in the work of E.F. (“Fred”) Benson and Rumer Godden, residents in 1919-1940 and 1968-1973 respectively. This is a writers’ house, then, and the authors who came after Henry James can be considered literary tourists themselves, entirely aware of James’s presence. But it is a writerly house as well, since Lamb House has been successively memorialised in fiction. We can even speculate that the house is a kind of literary muse, an active participant in literary creation.

At first glance, Lamb House is an entirely conventional example of the writer’s house museum, however, with the genre’s familiar faults. Run by the National Trust since 1950, it suffers somewhat as a tourist vehicle: there are few of James’s personal effects, and the most obvious writer’s shrine, the Garden Room annex where James dictated his sentences to a patient typist in the summer months, was obliterated by the Luftwaffe at the height of the Battle of Britain. Visitors to Lamb House can be forgiven for sympathising with the critic Anne Trubek (2011, p. 5) when she writes that “Going to a writer’s house is a fool’s errand.” Virginia Woolf’s criticisms of literary tourism are now canonical, and she half-humorously floated the idea of an entrance exam to the Brontë parsonage at Haworth, to filter the casual callers who must make up most of the visitors. This interest in life rather than literature must surely be the case at Rye. The late novels written there cemented James’s reputation as “the Master,” but they challenge readers with their circumlocutory style, the effect of pacing and dictating his words to an amanuensis poised at the keys of a Remington typewriter. James had become by then a literary lion, the “the idol of an esoteric group” (Edmund Gosse, in Hyde, 1969, p. 287) but he was never a bestseller or a public darling. Chasing popular success in the theatre, and famously failing, was the reason that James retreated from London to Rye. Lamb House is nothing less than a red-brick monument to the Master’s martyrdom in the literary marketplace.

Henry James had anticipated Woolf’s fascination and disdain for literary tourism, larding Lamb House with extra irony. In “The Birthplace” (1903), written at Rye, James minutely anatomises the conscience of the guide and housekeeper of Shakespeare’s Stratford home, though the Bard is never named. The hapless Gedge, keeper of the literary flame, accepts that he is expected to embroider the sparse facts of the playwright’s life, to give tourists what they want (“In spite of the fool it makes of every one?”: “Say because of that. We only ask to believe every one is a fool!”) We might then think that Lamb House is but “an altar to the antithesis of itself” (Harvey, 2007: 76), the quotidian business of a writer’s life cancelling out precisely what it is that makes that life worth recalling.

On the other hand, Lamb House is far more than one more instance of the guilty pleasures of literary tourism. Lamb House cannot be subsumed into the paradoxical figure of “the Author” (Watson, 2020, p. 213), if for no other reason that this is a writers’ house in the plural. E.F. Benson, known for the light comedy of the Mapp and Lucia stories (1920-1939), and Rumer Godden, now best known as the author of Black Narcissus (1939), are almost equal contributors to Lamb House’s literary appeal. Benson and Gooden can be thought of as literary tourists, in fact. They came to a house that was not in “vacant possession,” in the resonantly spectral language of property law. Fred Benson reflected fulsomely on writing in the bulking shadow of the Master. As a family friend and aspirant author, it was “a great honour and something of an adventure to be asked to stay with Henry James in this house at Rye that he had lately bought,” and entering Rye’s “circle of enchantment” (Benson, 1940: 1). The “preordained decrees of fate” (Benson, 1940: 142) caught up with him twenty years later when he came to stay for good, transforming Rye into the “Tilling” of Mapp and Lucia. Benson wrote with the spirit of Henry James at his shoulder, recalling the Garden Room, “once resonant with the booming voice of Henry James and the clack of the responsive typist” (Benson, 1940, p. 142). Nor could Rumer Godden resist the metaphor of haunting in her 1989 autobiography, titling her chapter about her time in Lamb House, “Shades of Henry James.”

Lamb House is a direct source of inspiration to these writers. So we can also think of it as a writerly house. In the first novel that James produced after his relocation to Rye, The Awkward Age (1899), Lamb House becomes the home of Mr Longdon, the elderly American who rescues the vulnerable Nanda from the corrupting associations of English high society. Lamb House is Longdon’s “charming serious house” exactly, “old, square, red-roofed, well assured of its right to the place it took up in the world,” its “look of possession” enhanced by “the long confirmation of time,” where “Everything in the place is such good company” (James, 1987, p. 204, 197, 198). The house is fairy-enchanted: as Vanderbank, Nanda’s likeliest suitor, puts it: “face to face with this dear old house, in this jolly old nook, one is too contented to move, lest raising a finger even should break the spell” (James, 1987, p. 197). It is a “temple of peace” (James, 1987, p. 137), albeit poor Nanda is symbolically entombed, doomed to be “much more like the dead than like the living” (James, 1987, p. 31).

In a much sunnier mood, as “Mallards,” the house rented by one half of the forever feuding Mapp and Lucia, Lamb House is a place of charm and acid wit. Such was the popularity of the stories that literary tourists at one time came not for the Master but for the fictional Lucia: “Mallards, where Lucia lived, was a faithful delineation of Lamb House where I lived. Visitors to Rye quite often asked which was Lucia’s house, and which Miss Mapp’s” (Benson, 1940, p. 271). Less well known is the uncanny appearance of Lamb House in Benson’s ghost stories, driven by his lifelong interest in the supernatural. Lamb House appears at least twice, firstly in “Machaon” (1923), where a medium receives from her “control,” the eponymous ancient Greek physician, prescient impressions of the narrator’s house, the description of the garden annex being the clinching detail. And in “Roderick’s Story” (1923), the narrator offers his house to a dying friend, Roderick wanting to die in the room where his lost love breathed her last. Roderick’s memory of “a big garden-room, full of books, with a bow-window looking down the cobbled street” (Benson, 2012, p. 357) confirms a spiritual connection with the house that reaches beyond the grave.

Chasing ghosts is the business model of literary tourism, of course. In the “homes and haunts” tradition, the visitor becomes “a vicarious guest” (Booth, 2016, pp. 28-29) in the writer’s house, both hunting and haunting the shade of the author. But at Lamb House, the literary tourist is haunted as much by the house as by the writer or writers. Writers’ houses are surely more than “tools to stimulate one’s imagination” (Hendrix, 2008, p. 239). Following the lead of Henry James (“Mr Longdon had not made his house, he had simply lived it”: James, 1987, p. 204), we can venture that bricks and mortar impress themselves on writers as well as their characters and their readers. This is not merely the “imprinting” of lives upon domestic interiors – the old idea, familiar from ghost stories, that houses remember events, responsible for the clichéd association of writers’ houses with haunting, “the invisible pulsating within the visible” (see Watson, 2020, pp. 15-16). Moving from personification to full-blown prosopopoeia, we might instead conceive of the house as an active presence, a literary muse, and maybe more. For all houses have voices, as Virginia Woolf writes in her 1932 essay “Great Men’s Houses.” This is the thesis of Joan Aitken’s The Haunting of Lamb House (1991), where Lamb House “had not waited in passivity” for Henry James’s approach (Aitken, 2022, p. 117) but summoned him to Rye. Fred Benson’s tenure is similarly presented as affirming the power of the house to “invite” its residents, and specifically to select writers: “Evidently it likes writers; literary men” (Aiken, 2022, p. 179). Godden (2013, p. 1) is more straightforward still, though she had not (yet) been called to Rye: “The house, it seems, is more important than the characters. ‘In me you exist,’ says the house.”

If houses speak, Lamb House is much more than a writer’s house museum. It is an inspiration to writers, a literary muse, a hauntedly storied house.

How to cite this dictionary entry: Howell, P. (2026). The literary haunting of Lamb House. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

References

Aiken, J. (2022). The haunting of Lamb House. Gateway.

Benson, E. F. (1940). Final edition: Informal autobiography. Longmans, Green & Co.

Booth, A. (2016). Homes and haunts: Touring writers’ shrines and countries. Oxford University Press.

Godden, R. ([1945] 2013). A fugue in time. Virago.

Harvey, J. (2007). Lessons of the Master: The Henry James novel. The Yearbook of English Studies, 37, 75-88. https://doi.org.10.1353/yes.2007.0010

Hendrix, H. (2008). Epilogue: the appeal of writers’ houses, in H. Hendrix (Ed.), Writers’ homes and the making of memory (pp. 235-243). Routledge.

Hyde, H. M. (1969). Henry James at home. Methuen.

James, H. (1987). The awkward age. Penguin.

Trubek, A. (2011). A skeptic’s guide to writers’ houses. University of Philadelphia Press.

Watson, N. J. (2020). The author’s effects: On writers’ house museums. Oxford University Press.