Literary tourism: literature developments and research lines from 2015 to 2020

Abstract

Although literary tourism is still an understudied field, the beneficial relationship between tourism and literature is becoming very clear. Literary tourism involves the literary heritage of places, namely visits to sites related to literary works and the lives of writers. There are already some empirical studies that demonstrate the importance of this type of tourism as a guarantee of cultural enrichment of destinations and sustainable tourism practices. This tourism has begun to be explored in the development of tourism products and experiences, such as itineraries, or infrastructures linked to literary heritage that increase the attractiveness and competitiveness of destinations. This study analyzes literary tourism as a field of research and explores its state of the art through a bibliometric review that includes content analysis. For this purpose, articles published in the period 2015–2020, identified in the Web of Science database, were analyzed. The results identify the main topics of these publications and their temporal analysis, the research methods and techniques applied, the case studies related to authors and works, also the geographies studied and some important insights on literary tourism that address different dimensions. Overall, this study provides a rich understanding of the contemporary study of literary tourism, in a particularly rich period in terms of scientific advances in this area, still under-expressed.