The Author's House as Tourist Space

Literary tourism is an experience to which James was particularly sensitive, at once pungently critical and personally involved. The guiding image of the essay is the author’s house as an inherently paradoxical space, at the same time material and symbolic, intimate and public, framed by the “tourist gaze” and yet open to be reshaped by individual imagination; a space of long-standing fidelities but also of creative betrayals. Starting the investigation with James’s early 20th –century stories allows to capture James’s keen awareness of the nascent, pivotal dynamics related to the tourist interest in the writer-as-celebrity, which has established itself as a favorite theme of contemporary literature.