What ’ s lit got to do with it ? Deconstructing the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site
searching other means of engaging with a book or its author ( see Buell 177 ; Johnson 105 ; Lowe 40 ; Santesso 379 ; Watson 11 ; Westover 12 ). Other scholars contend literary places allow readers to further savor a text by learning more about the place or people who inspired the work , where a story was set , or the life of an author ( Iwashita 75 ; Santesso 379 ; Watson 12 ). Given that many authors are widely known to use references to real places and actual , identifiable landmarks in their literary tales as a means of grounding the imaginative in reality ( Groth 3 ) and making the entire story more believable ( Groth 3 ; Pocock 51 ), visiting these locations is enticing for tourists .
Literature and Place
More broadly , the relationship between literature and place has been widely considered . Humanistic geographers , Taun ( 28 ) and Lefebvre ( 86 ), contend otherwise indistinguishable spaces become specific places ( or a location becomes a meaningful and unique destination ) in part through how we communicate about it and the ways people move around and act within it . Literature is one of the many ways we communicate about place . Literature gives people a way to visit a place they have never been and to imagine places unknown to them . In turn , literature shapes , in part , the way we think about place ( Ryden 32 ; Taun 28 ). In the United States , for example , the local color movement in literature is largely credited with creating , stereotyping , and entrenching images of different regions of the country in the minds of the American public ( Baker 33 ; Litwiller-Berte 142 ; Hsu 37 ; Shortridge 285 ). The literary genre , which featured detailed depictions of everyday life ( albeit fictionalized and embellished ) in geographic locations and social landscapes around the quickly expanding nation , found a huge following just after the Civil War when the railroads were building westward and new ar-
63