Literary Tourist Guides as a Form of New Literary History. A Popular Genre in the Field of Professional Literary Knowledge

Abstract

Abstract Literary historiography is not indifferent to phenomena that are of key importance to contemporary culture and the humanities, including tourism and travel writing/travel studies. By trying to incorporate the ways a contemporary person experiences the world, literary history uses narrative strategies that are typical of current travel discourse-e. g. of a tourist guide. A tourist guide is an applied genre and also a cultural representation of the literary past of a city or region. The central category for literary tourist guides is space and mobility (rather than timelines and other figures important in a grand literary history). Space functions here as the subject of narration and as the basic principle that orders the material. In that context, the form of a tourist guide is a way of presenting the literary past, remembering the history of the city and its literary works, the lives of writers. Adapting a tourist guidebook for the needs of literary history results from the fact that everyday practices, such as travel and walking, influence professional forms of knowledge. This article shows how academic knowledge (here: literary history) can be learned and popularised by means of a non-academic genre (here: literary tourist guides).