Episode Details

Are we consuming an authentic place, or are we willingly participating in a beautifully staged performance designed around our own expectations?

In this opening episode of Journey 7, we begin our exploration of literary tourism. When we travel to the places that inspired our favorite books, whose landscape are we actually stepping into? Today. we cross the eight-mile concrete expanse onto Prince Edward Island to investigate the massive, multi-million dollar infrastructure designed to capitalize on Anne of Green Gables. Along the way, we unpack our collective urge to buy raspberry cordials and straw hats.

Along the way, we discover the strange history of the historical Grand Tour, and we investigate the “tourist gaze” and how the global tourism industry packages our favorite books into easily consumed souvenirs. If you love travelogues, literary history, or exploring the real-world histories behind famous books like Anne of Green Gables, this episode will challenge the way we view our next vacation destination.

Episode 7.01 –

Grand Tours Pt 1: The Postcard Illusion

Readings & Resources:

• Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Anne of Green Gables. 1908
• Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Anne of the Island. 1915
• Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Anne’s House of Dreams. 1917
• Montgomery, Lucy Maud. The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery. Edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston
• Montgomery, Lucy Maud. The Story Girl. 1911

• MacLeod, Nicola E. Literary Fiction Tourism: Understanding the Practice of Fiction-Inspired Travel. Routledge, 2024

Glossary:

Grand Tour: A traditional, multi-year journey across continental Europe that served as a mandatory educational rite of passage for upper-class, wealthy young men from the 17th to the mid-19th centuries. Officially intended to complete a gentleman’s classical education by exposing him to the art, architecture, and polite society of the Old World, it also provided a socially acceptable escape from parental control to pursue worldly pleasures and construct an elite “martial masculinity.”

Tourist Gaze: How travelers view and consume a destination, shaped by what guidebooks and the tourism industry have conditioned them to expect to see. 

Skeptical Pilgrim: A traveler who deeply loves a literary work or historical destination but adopts a critical, questioning posture, refusing to passively accept the fictionalized, manufactured reality that a tourist destination attempts to sell them. 

Listener’s Guide Reflection Questions

1. When you select a specific souvenir from a location, how does that physical object alter or secure the memory of the real space you left behind?
2. Consider the texts you choose to read versus the places you choose to visit; what makes a comforting historical fiction preferable to a reality of contemporary labor?
3. In analyzing your own home, what is the process of selection behind the display pieces on