Abstract:
Literary heritage has many facets, with texts and writers at its core. More broadly it includes the infrastructure supporting, promoting and conserving texts and sites associated with writers (houses, workplaces, graves and memorials). This paper focuses on literary house museums and the role of the physical artifact and community networks in nurturing cultural memory. Appreciation of literary houses as significant cultural and economic assets expanded internationally in the twentieth century and today there are agencies protecting and promoting sites, with associated scholarship. Literary houses have their own idiosyncrasies, but also commonalities with other forms of tangible heritage and wider debates around relevance, preservation and tourism. The major issues are investigated through case studies of New Zealand’s four leading literary house museums. These explore the creation, conservation and value of literary houses; and how they are supported privately, publically and legally. They highlight the complications of heritage, its evolving webs of significance and its material and political vulnerability. While writers might prefer to be remembered for their literature, their houses perpetuate reputations and provide a conduit to new audiences. Houses, often perverse and peculiar, offer narratives of personalities, place and history. All of New Zealand’s literary houses have led to the preservation of architecturally unexceptional sites – but values revise over time – and now afford insights into New Zealand’s ‘ordinary’ architectural history and urban development. They are inadvertent catalysts for broader reflections on New Zealand’s evolving social history, cultural identity and heritage values.