Exploring literary pilgrimage: Interpreting literature at the intersection of story, place, and reader

Literary pilgrimage is developed as a method for interpreting literature and is used to create original readings of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847), Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868/9), A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter (1909), and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927). Based on theoretical research in religious and literary studies, the study demonstrates how pilgrimage is a tool that offers a way for extra-textual and subjective experiences to be a part of disciplined literary criticism. This research shows that the interaction of reader, literary work, and place within the process of a journey can produce vibrant and effective interpretations as pilgrimage becomes a method of inquiry. Furthermore, it allows for engaged and personal reading to be integrated with academic analysis. Scholarship in religious studies provides the basis for claiming that visits to sites of literary significance parallel religious pilgrimages. Using the theoretical framework of pilgrimage studies, this research reveals a dynamic that occurs at the intersection of place, story, and pilgrim. Termed 'pilgrimage dynamic' this concept provides one means of exploring the transformation and interpretation that occurs during a pilgrimage. Experiential education, reader-response theories, feminism studies, and ecocriticsm support the idea that a person's subjective experience of a text can legitimately play a part in interpretation. Finally, narrative scholarship provides a disciplined means to integrate the experience of the scholar with traditional, text-based research.