Henry James and the Tourist Imagination

This essays focuses on Henry James’s late tale “The Birthplace.” Underlining the multiple entanglements of James’s fiction with the new development of mass tourism, this essays traces in this long story a number of concepts—the author as simulacrum, authenticity as the object of the tourist’s desire and as a staged effect, the search for an intimacy with the author’s personality as a mediator of such a quest—that, while pertaining to tourism as a modern mass phenomenon, display a surprising analogy with the rhetorical strategies James was himself enacting in his construction of authorship in the Prefaces. By deploying a sustained analogy between the reader and the tourist and by offering the reader the kind of “intimate” perception of his novels, filtered through the author’s private experience, that birthplaces and other commodified tourist sites were then increasingly offering their visitors, the author argues, James was attempting to defuse the dichotomy of high vs. popular culture and establish anew the author-reader relationship, himself enacting his own revisionary intervention into the literary field