Tourist Literature Research Articles

Writing Home: Martin Walser's Ein fliehendes Pferd as Anti-Tourist Literature

This paper examines the novella Ein fliehendes Pferd (A Runaway Horse) by Lake Constance author Martin Walser as ‘anti-tourist literature’. The popularity of Lake Constance as a tourist destination owes much to its beautiful natural landscape, which is often depicted in romantic images and words in the tourist brochures and guidebooks from the region. Local author, Walser uses similar descriptions of the natural landscape in his novella, which tells the story of four disillusioned tourists and their disappointing holiday by Lake Constance, but provides a local, critical perspective on constructions of the place Lake Constance by the tourist industry. The paper reflects on the ways in which Walser's ‘anti-tourist’ characters react to, and are influenced by, the natural landscape and the holiday destination. It focuses on the satirical use of typical tourist brochure and guidebook descriptions of the landscape, and the ways in which changes in the landscape mirror changes in the destructive relationship between the four characters. The paper makes an important contribution to the field of tourism and cultural change in its focus on anti-tourist literature as a literature of resistance to the impacts of tourism and tourist literature on places and their inhabitants.

Histories of tourism: representation, identity, and conflict

Introduction - John K. Walton 1. Empires of Travel: British Guide Books and Cultural Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - John M. Mackenzie 2. 'How and Where to go': The Role of Travel Journalism in Britain and the Evolution of Foreign Tourism, 1840-1914 - Jill Steward 3. Selling Air: Marketing the Intangible at British Resorts - John Beckerson and John K. Walton 4. Tourism in Augustan Society (44 BC - AD 69) - Loykie Lomine 5. A Century of Tourism in Northern Spain: the Development of High-Quality Provision between 1815 and 1914 - Carlos Larrinaga 6. Japanese Tea Party: Representations of Victorian Paradise and Playground in The Geisha (1896) - Yorimitsu Hashimoto 7. Radical Nationalism in an International Context: Strength Through Joy and the Paradoxes of Nazi Tourism - Shelley Baranowski 8. 'Travel in Merry Germany': Tourist Culture in the Third Reich - Kristin Semmens 9. Coffee, Klimt and Climbing: Constructing an Austrian National Identity in Tourist Literature 1918-38 - Corinna Peniston-Bird 10. Paradise Lost and Found: Tourists and Expatriates in El Terreno, Palma de Mallorca, from the 1920s to the 1950s - John K. Walton 11. '50 places rolled into 1': The Development of Domestic Tourism at Pleasure Grounds in Inter-War England - Helen Pussard 12. Public Beaches and Private Beach Huts: a Case Study of Interwar Clacton and Frinton, Essex Laura Chase 13. 'The Most Magical Corner of England': Tourism, Preservation and the Development of the Lake District, 1919-1939' - Clifford O'Neill.

Festivals and events — (Re)interpreting cultural identity

The issues at stake in this paper namely concern the changes in the cultural identity representations of territorial landscapes as a result of increasing mobility of which tourism is but one of the numerous forms. The decision to focus on festivals and events is that: 1. Traditionally speaking, festivals and events are both the result and the signifiers of the cultural identity of spaces within which they occur; 2. In more recent years, they have increasingly been instrumented as a marketing tool in the development of tourist spaces as can be attested by the large body of tourist literature; 3. Beyond the emphasis placed by researchers on the economic impacts of events organization, there has been a growing interest in investigating their social impacts. 4. Limited attention has been paid to comparing the strategies of events organization, the way they intervene on cultural identity and the ensuing impacts on territorial development in general. Accordingly, it was decided that an investigation of regularly recurring events, which have become part of the territorial landscapes within which they occur, would be led to try and answer the following questions: 1. How do festivals and events contribute to staging the particularities of cultural identity within different spaces? 2. Are these festivals and events staged simultaneously to encourage greater mobilities to and within the given spaces and to devise better responses to the mobilities that have already modified them? 3. To what extent do festivals and events contribute to re‐interpreting cultural identity?

‘Tiger in Paradise’: Reading global Mauritius in shifting time and space

This article consists of a reading of global financial magazines and tourist literature in the context of Mauritius' more recent self-promotion as an economic ‘Asian tiger’ miracle. This new representation signals a burgeoning hybrid postcolonial Mauritian identity that re-inscribes Asian diasporic history. Such a re-alignment decenters colonial Europe and regionalises Mauritius as part of Asia. Mauritian modernity is engendered by neo-Orientalist narratives inspired by a resurgence of colonial constructions of Mauritius as an erotic paradise, and a recycling of Asian tiger ethos. Collapsing Mauritius into the tiger cultural geography is particularly problematic for a multicultural nation since this emergent self-representation denies the contribution of people of non-Asian heritage. Inspiring itself from Asian ‘alter/native’ modernity, Mauritian global modernity also derives from a male-oriented capitalist paradigm and a subscription to discriminatory macho Asian tiger ideologies. It is the jingle ‘Tiger in paradise’ (Financial Times, 27 September 1994) which, I will conclude, most clearly interweaves the ambivalent colonial and diasporic constituents of postcolonial Mauritius.

Marketing Heritage: Archaeology and the Consumption of the Past (review)

Yorke Rowan and Uzi Baram (eds.), Marketing Heritage: Archaeology and the Consumption of the Past. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2004, 315 pp. Archaeologists came relatively late to the post-modern scene (indeed, some are still en route), but when we did arrive, we discovered to our surprise that the interpretation of the past did have a real impact on life in the here-and-now. This idea was not exactly new; Bettina Arnold, just to name one example, documented how the Nazis used archaeology in support of their goals in the 1940s, showing the awareness of this connection at least that early (Arnold 1991). More recently, Christopher Chippendale (1990) published Who Owns Stonehenge?, a discussion of the uses of the monument which included archaeologists, druids, earth magicians, and other interested parties. Despite these early forays, it has only been fairly recently that this has become a major topic of archaeological analysis. It is in this spirit that this book, Marketing Heritage: Archaeology and the Consumption of the Past, is offered. It is perhaps not as cutting edge as the authors seem to think, but it is nevertheless an interesting collection of analyses of the various ways in which archaeological sites and knowledge become There is a reasonable breadth of world coverage, with articles on Guatemala, the US, and Cambodia as well as Europe and the Near East. The unifying theme concerns how the interpretation of sites for the public reflects concerns of the dominant cultures, governments, and archaeologists, with most articles being presented as case studies. In these cases, the aim is to demonstrate that some aspects of information about the past are foregrounded, while others are hidden in various ways. Yet each study does this through a different medium of analysis, and all have interesting contributions to make. To my mind, two of the most interesting are the discussions of souvenir shops at Stonehenge and Avebury, and the analysis of heritage road signs in Jordan. Gazin-Schwartz discusses how the objects sold at Stonehenge show the monument as isolated in the past, but representing a wide range of tastes, academic content, and cost. By contrast, the Avebury souvenirs presented a particular, narrow vision of Britain's past as a pastoral paradise of happy peasants and benevolent landowners, with the monument as a part of that cultural landscape. This puts the two sites in entirely different lights in terms of how they connect the past with the present. In Jordan, Addison shows how far more attention is drawn to Christian sites than Muslim ones, a troubling observation in a country that is ninety-eight percent Muslim. These sites are highlighted not only in tourist literature, but also by road signs (their prevalence, placement, and language) and the quality of their access roads. This struck me as a particularly nifty way to go about exploring the privileging of certain aspects of a nation's archaeological heritage. As someone who does archaeology in Ireland, I was drawn to Costa's study of the sites of Newgrange, Tara, and Navan Fort. It seemed promising given the significance of tourism in Ireland, but I was somewhat disappointed and rather confused by the article. While this is fertile ground for analysis (the controversy over the Navan Fort interpretive center alone is worthy of detailed analysis) the article contains a good deal of internal contradiction. …

Literature, cultural identity and the limits of authenticity: a composite approach

AbstractAlthough tourism scholarship has paid much attention to the concept of authenticity in relation to the homogenisation of tourism representation, this term has limits that curb its usefulness for analysing subtle interrelations of place, representation and identity. Some recent work has attempted to recuperate authenticity by associating it with experience and activity, however we suggest that the concept of cultural identity allows for greater attention to the fluid movements of social power relations that inform the tourist site. By undertaking a comparative analysis of three global tourist sites located in the Middle East (Jerusalem), North America (Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan) and Europe (Isle of Wight), this article discusses the politics of representation vis à vis identity as manifested in a spectrum of tourism‐related literature ranging from pamphlets, maps and guidebooks, to more creative approaches in contemporary novels and poetry. This comparative survey of literature explores questions of identity on several fronts: first, it prompts questions about how religious, historical and national identities are formulated in and through the tourist site; second, it leads to an assessment of a site's claim to status as a work of art that prompts aesthetic identification; and finally, it allows one to consider how other works of art — in this case, novelistic or poetic representations — both affirm and question identities presented by standard tourist literature. These alternative textual representations demonstrate not only how cultural identity as represented in the tourist site is an active site of struggle, but also present alternative politics of place and identity that enable a greater diversity of interpretations of the tourist site. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The translation of tourist literature: The case of connectors

This article will report on a small-scale study which focuses on the analysis of connectors (conjunctions and discourse markers) in thematic position in English translations of Spanish tourist literature. The concept of 'theme' adopted here draws on the explicit descriptions provided by systemic grammar (Halliday 1985). The study will be carried out on a corpus composed of 'comparable texts' (Baker 1998; Laviosa 1997) (texts written in English and texts in English translated from Spanish) and of the corresponding Spanish source texts. Following Francis (1989, 1990), Fries (1995) and Ghadessy (1995) among others, it is argued here that the analysis of patterns of theme selection provide important insights into the writing and, therefore, translation of a specific genre.

AUSTRALIAN WATERFALLS AS TOURISM ATTRACTIONS

For a largely arid country with generally low relief, Australia has a remarkably large number of waterfalls. Found mainly near the coast, close to where most of the population lives and near the major tourist resort areas, Australia’s falls have long been popular scenic attractions and places for recreation. They play an important role in the country’s tourism, even in seaside resort areas where the main attractions are sunshine, sandy beaches, and surf. The aesthetic appeal of waterfalls and their value as recreational and tourism resources are recognized by the inclusion of many in national parks. This article examines the way in which Australian waterfalls have been developed and promoted as tourist attractions. It considers threats to the sustainable use of waterfall resources posed by power schemes and, particularly, by the tourist industry itself. Queensland’s Gold Coast is selected as a case study. The discussion draws largely on an examination of tourist literature from the 19th to the 21st century, including holiday brochures and guidebooks, together with field observation in Australia and other countries.

Wild Ways and Paths of Pleasure: Access to British waterfalls, 1500–2000

In Britain the rise of tourism, largely associated with the Romantic taste for landscape, encouraged travel to relatively inaccessible areas. Among travellers in search of the picturesque and the sublime, waterfalls were particularly popular, but these were commonly difficult and dangerous places to visit. The impact of tourism on the evolution of the landscape at waterfall sites over a period during which people travelled to tourist centres on horseback, by coach, by rail and by motor vehicle is examined. Drawing on topographical, travel and tourist literature from the sixteenth century to 2000, together with extensive field observation, the evolution from the 'natural' to the designed landscape, created to meet the needs of, and to attract, visitors, is considered. It is demonstrated how, while facilitating visits to natural attractions such as waterfalls, improved access and the provision of amenities have changed valued landscapes and, hence, the visitor's experience of them.

Folk for Whom? Tourist Guidebooks, Local Color, and the Spiritual Churches of New Orleans

The transformation of local culture into local color at the hands of the tourism industry is a global phenomenon. Tourist guidebooks, as markers of tourist sights, play a major role in this process, and thereby help to construct the tourist gaze and the tourist experi- ence itself. In New Orleans, guidebooks from the Federal Writers' Project of the 1930s to commercial publications of the 1990s have included the Spiritual churches as local color. The descriptions of the churches in the guidebooks emphasize their link to Louisi- ana folk culture, especially voodoo. What is ignored is the complexity of the religion and the extent to which the churches' beliefs, rituals, and organization resemble mainstream Christian denominations. The perpetuation of this image of the Spiritual churches in the guidebooks is necessary, however, because markers have to point somewhere in their de- scriptions of Voodoo as a part of the local culture. A Short History of Tourist Guidebooks AMONG TOURIST DESTINATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES, Louisiana has long been a favorite. While the state as a whole has unique attractions, New Orleans has been the drawing card. Visitors stroll the streets of the French Quarter and Garden District, dine in Cre- ole restaurants, listen to traditional jazz, ride on streetcars along St. Charles Avenue, and visit the tomb of the area's most famous 19th-century voodoo practitioner, Marie Laveau. These are among the city's most popular attractions and constitute the core of the typical tourist experience. In contrast, city residents have access to places and events that can be described as the (Goffman 1959). This is the local culture that visitors seldom see but sometimes witness as staged performances or read about in magazines and tourist literature. Among the backstage events in New Orleans, un- doubtedly the best known are the second-line parades organized by a variety of African American social clubs and benevolent societies. 1 In a recent analysis of second-line pa- rades as local culture, Helen Regis describes them as celebratory occasions that trans- form urban space creating an alternative social order that private clubs actualize by 'taking it to the streets' in those very neighborhoods ordinarily dominated by the quotidian

Dixie before Disney: 100 Years of Roadside Fun

Dixie Before Disney: 100 Years of Roadside Fun. By Tim Hollis. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, c. 1999. Pp. xiv, 193. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 1-57806-118-0; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 1-57806-117-2). Tim Hollis, a resident of Birmingham, Alabama, takes readers on a tour of the variety of amusements--natural or manufactured, oversized or miniature, successful or failed--that grew up along roadsides in the South from roughly the nineteenth century to the present. Hollis was himself introduced to such roadside attractions as a child in the 1960s. His father preserved these moments in time by taking photographs during family automobile trips, and also by passionately saving the road maps, tour planners, menus, ticket stubs, matchbooks, postcards, periodical advertisements, receipts, and other souvenir ephemera. Hollis based his account on memories of a lifetime of trips, supplemented by tourist literature. The book is written from the perspective of a nostalgic journey and has the depth of a travelogue. The South was in many ways a pioneer in tourism. George Washington mapped out the area around Natural Bridge, Virginia, in the 1700s, and Thomas Jefferson later built a cabin there for visitors. President Andrew Jackson designated Hot Springs, Arkansas, a federal reservation long before other areas became national parks. Silver Springs, Florida, attracted former Civil War soldiers, including Generals Grant and Sherman. Communities that did not attract visitors with their distinct geographical features (such as falls, springs, swamps, and caverns) or with local landmarks (such as forts, battlefields, and birthplaces of notable people) manufactured attractions in the form of monuments, observation towers, museums, and amusement parks, or staged local pageants and festivals. Inscriptions painted on barn roofs about Rock City were just one of many marketing devices that for decades funneled curious travelers to Lookout Mountain. Entrepreneurs attempted to capitalize on the tourist trade by erecting offerings that appeared to be out of place in the region--for example, Wild West Parks, Ghost Cities, and Tiki Villages--or fabricated places like Cherokee, North Carolina, Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and Panama City, Florida. Floridaland may have been the tackiest of all--it offered Everything You Came To Florida To See (p. 170). Hollis indicates that shifts from travel by railroad and steamboat to automobile, and then to airlines, altered the class composition, destination, duration, and expectations of tourists. Railroads and steamboats brought wealthy tourists who could afford to spend extended time at grand resorts and natural features. …

READING WITH YIN YANG EYES: NEGOTIATING THE IDEOLOGICAL DILEMMA OF A CHINESE AMERICAN BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS

AbstractChinese Americans living in today's "postcolonial" North America are often confronted by various forms of neocolonialism. It is no exception for those working within the field of biblical studies. In order to publish and be recognized within the guild, Chinese Americans are often asked to make the "nonchoice" between forsaking their own culture and engaging in the production of some exotic "biblical tourist literature" for others to visit and "sightsee" in times of leisure. This article attempts to expose the oppressive binarism of—in Cornel West's terms—"faceless universalism" and "ethnic chauvinism," and explore how Chinese American Bible scholars may negotiate this ideological dilemma by reading from a marginal site/sight.

The construction of memory in interwar France

This work takes a look at the human impact of World War I by examining the ways in which the French remembered their veterans and war dead after the armistice. Arguing that memory is more than just a record of experience, this cultural history offers a perspective on how commemoration of World War I helped to shape post-war French society and politics. Daniel Sherman shows how a wartime visual culture saturated with images of ordinary foot soldiers, together with contemporary novels, memoirs and tourist literature, promoted a distinctive notion of combat experience. The contrast between battlefield and home front, soldier and civilian was the basis for memory and collective gratitude. Post-war commemoration, however, also grew directly out of the search for the remains of hundreds of thousands of missing soldiers, and the sometimes contentious debates over where to bury them. For this reason, the local monument, with its inscribed list of names and its functional resemblance to tombstobes, emerged as the focal point of commemorative practice. Sherman traces every step in the process of monument building as he analyzes commemoration's competing goals - to pay tribute to the dead, to console the bereaved and to incorporate mourner's individual memories into a larger political discourse.

Mapping tourist pressure: Discussion, development and examples

This paper discusses research which has been conducted irregularly over a period of some thirty years on the topic of tourist pressure and how this phenomenon can be portrayed. This is a relatively undeveloped topic which has not received much attention in the tourist literature, and yet it is felt that the concept mad its application hold considerable potential benefit for tourism planning and management. The key issue is to develop a methodology which allows the phenomenon to be adequately described and portrayed in such a manner that the resulting information can be integrated into the appropriate management of tourist numbers.

The Naming of Bermuda

AbstractThere have been many changes to and confusions surrounding the naming of Bermuda and the name Bermuda itself. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one finds the Isle of Devils and the variants Bermuda Isles and Somers Islands. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one sees the use of Bermuda Islands and The Bermudas to an equal degree, while recently Bermuda has predominated. Throughout history, there has been confusion over whether Bermuda was one or several islands; in addition, analogy to such names as Barbados, Barbuda, the Bahamas, and even the Virginias has added to the confusion. The name given to Bermuda in other European languages reflects the same confusion as has been present in English. At present, Bermuda is used as the official designation for the country; however, Bermuda Islands can still be found on maps and tourist literature published in Bermuda.

«London in all its glory—or how to enjoy London»: guidebook representations of imperial London

Tourism has played a significant but often unacknowledged role in the construction of the modern city as a place to be seen and experienced. Guidebooks to modern European cities have usually interpreted them as sites of deep history, or as examples of a modern world in the making, or as centres of power and influence. This final trope was most common in representations of the capital cities of the imperial powers. This paper traces changing representations of London in its tourist literature from mid-Victorian triumphalism to the city's re-invention at the end of the twentieth century as a postimperial spectacle. It concentrates on mass-market guidebooks and others which were written explicitly for tourists from the British empire. This history points to long-running anxieties about London's cityscape as a fitting symbol of imperial power. It also shows how readings of London which emphasized its global pre-eminence were replaced by alternative, more «domestic» understandings of imperialism and the imperial city in the interwar period. The paper stresses the significance of tourist guidebooks as a form of popular geographical knowledge. Rather than dismissing them as clichéd and one-dimensional, this account stresses both their diversity and their status as «transcultural» texts.

The Aztec palimpsest: Mexico in the modern imagination

Mexico is more than a country; it is a concept that is the product of a complex network of discourses as disparate as the rhetoric of Chicano nationalism, English-language literature about Mexico, and Mexican tourist propaganda. The idea of Mexicanness, says Daniel Cooper Alarcon, arisen through a process of erasure and superimposition as these discourses have produced contentious and sometimes contradictory descriptions of their subject. By considering Mexicanness as a palimpsest of these competing yet interwoven narratives, Cooper offers a paradigm through which the construction and representation of cultural identity can be studied. He shows how the Chicano myth of Aztlan was constructed upon earlier Mesoamerican myths, discusses representations of Mexico in texts by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, and analyzes the content of tourist literature, thereby revealing the economic, social, and political interests that drive the production of Mexicanness today. This original linking of seemingly incongruous discourses corrects the misconception that Mexicanness is produced only by hegemonic groups. Cooper shows how Mexico has been defined and represented, by both Mexicans and non-Mexicans, as more than a political or geographic entity, and he particularly reveals how Mexicanness has been exploited by Mexicans themselves through the promotion of tourism as a form of neocolonialism. Cooper's work is valuable both for identifying attempts to revise and control Mexican myth, history, and culture and for defining the intricate relationship between history, historiography, and cultural nationalism. The Aztec Palimpsest extends existing analyses of Mexicanness into new theoretical realms and provides a fresh perspective on the relationship between the United States and Mexico at a time when these two nations are becoming more intimately linked.

Canadian tourist information and the UK: plans and perceptions

How well is a particular emphasis in product formulation by a host country transmitted to potential overseas clients? The question is examined here in the context of a systematic attempt by Tourism Canada over the past 10 years to promote Canadian cultural activities. The investigation studies one aspect of the marketing mix - promotion - and examines the product segments, as defined by Tourism Canada, which should be most heavily targeted in such promotion. It is concluded that, in general, these product segments have been appropriately defined and that transactions employing them reflect the intentions of Tourism Canada. In particular, Travel Agents and Tour Operators are presenting cultural activities in a way consistent with the intentions of Canadian tourism planning for the UK. However, the tourist literature provided at both the national and provincial level does not properly reflect this current Canadian emphasis on cultural activities.

De la poupée de bois à l'emblème territorial : Guignol de Lyon

Saunier (Pierre-Yves. — From the wooden puppet to the local emblem : Guignol of Lyon. Guignol is a puppet that appeared in Lyon in the beginning of the XIXth century. Its popularity quickly reached Paris and the whole country. Today, Guignol is a symbol of Lyon that can be found in commercials or political leaflets. This destiny as a local emblem was set as soon as Guignol became a subject of interest for XIXth century journalists and erudites. Very early, these people turned Guignol and its theater plays into a conservatory of lyonese virtues, owing to a work of «invention of tradition» that took place mainly between 1860 and 1914. At the same time, the fea-tures of the «lyonese character» were definitly set up by the same men and groups that used and promoted Guignol. Thus, a very close link between Guignol, the silkweaver and Lyon made Laurent Mourguet's puppet a true to type object, «indispensable » to ail touristic literature as stated as early as in 1914 the mayor of Lyon Édourd Herriot. Le Monde Alpin et rhodanien, 3e-4e trimestres 1993, pp. 57 à 88.

Distant Encounters: Travel Literature and the Shifting Images of the Toraja of Sulawesi, Indonesia

(1991). Distant Encounters: Travel Literature and the Shifting Images of the Toraja of Sulawesi, Indonesia. Terrae Incognitae: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 81-92.