Literary tourism is a type of cultural tourism that deals with places and events from fictional texts as well as the lives of their authors. This could include following the route a fictional character charts in a novel, visiting particular settings from a story or tracking down the haunts of a novelist.
Literary tourists are specifically interested in how places have influenced writing and at the same time how writing has created place. In order to become a literary tourist you only need a novel and an inquisitive mind-set; however, there are literary guides, literary maps, and literary tours to help you on your way.
While most literary tourism is focused on famous works, more modern works that are written to specifically promote tourism are called tourism fiction. Modern tourism fiction can include travel guides within the story showing readers how to visit the real places in the fictional tales. With recent technological advances in publishing, digital tourism fiction books can even allow literary tourists to follow direct links to tourism websites related to the story. This can be done on new e-reading devices like the Kindle, iPad, iPhone, smart phones, tablets, and regular desktop and laptop computers. These links within the story allow readers to instantly learn about the real places without doing their own web searches.
The same technology of tourism fiction could be applied to classic literature in digital editions. For example, the Kindle edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby might include a live link to the real F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery, where the couple once lived with their daughter. These applications to classic literature have not been used in digital editions yet.
In addition to visiting author and book sites, literary tourists often engage in bookstore tourism, browsing local bookshops for titles specifically related to the sites as well as other regional books and authors.
Literary tourism is a National Research Foundation-funded project in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa that is working on a Literary Map connecting authors whose lives or work is tied in some significant way to specific places in KwaZulu-Natal. Each author entry contains a short biography, a selected bibliography and an excerpt from the author's work that relates to the place identified in the map.[1]