Hawthorne, a Pilgrimage to Salem, and the Poetics of Literary Tourism

Bibliographic Data

ID8895877
AuthorsCharles Baraw (corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume47
Issue1
Pages76-111
Publication date2016-12-21
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCanadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X
PublisherUniversity of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.3138/cras.2016.005
OpenAlexW2561727371
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited24

From the 1830s to the end of his career, Nathaniel Hawthorne used the tropes of aesthetic tourism to call out, or interpellate, the reader as a literary tourist. In many cases, Hawthorne’s focalizing persona points to the picturesque or sentimental qualities of a scene: in some cases, he transports readers to a past made visitable through the stories he recounts; in others, he serves as both guide and object of the tour. This article examines the “touristic poetics” that animate Hawthorne’s work by bringing together Hawthorne’s “Alice Doane’s Appeal” with a contemporaneous sketch by an anonymous reader. While the frame narrative of “Alice Doane’s Appeal” makes explicit the call to the literary tour, “A Day of Disappointment in Salem” represents a literary pilgrimage by a Southern tourist who is so moved by reading Twice-Told Tales that he decides to call on the author at his home. Together these works illustrate the textual poetics that helped shape literary production, reception, and tourism in the period and, at the same time, fostered the canonization of Hawthorne and his homes

Adventure · Appeal · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Genius · Literature · Narrative · Pilgrimage · Poetics · Poetry · Tourism · American and British Literature Analysis · American History and Culture · History · Literature: history, themes, analysis

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