Heritage, Screen and Literary Tourism

Sheela Agarwal, Gareth Shaw

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781845416263
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria dell'ospitalità e del turismo
• Index: Business

This book examines the main issues and concepts relating to heritage, screen and literary tourism (HSLT) and provides a comprehensive understanding and evaluation of these three forms of tourism in the context of global tourism development. It analyses the demand and supply of HSLT within the frameworks provided by service-dominant logic and value creation to enable a critical perspective on how HSLT tourist experiences are created, produced and shaped. The volume explores the challenges which relate to the role of the consumer in the co-creation of the tourist experience, and the implications this has for the development, marketing, interpretation, consumption, planning and management of HSLT. It will appeal to researchers and students of heritage tourism, film and literary tourism, media-driven tourism, tourism planning and destination development and management.

1Heritage Tourism: Exploring the Screen and Literary Nexus

Introduction

Understanding our past determines actively our ability to understand the present. So, how do we sift the truth from belief? How do we write our own histories, personally or culturally, and thereby define ourselves? How do we penetrate years, centuries of historical distortion, to find original truth? Tonight this will be our quest. (Robert Langdon, Da Vinci Code, 2006)

Symbologist, Robert Langdon, lead character of the novel (2003) and later cinematic production (2006) of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, a detective thriller steeped in history, myth and romance, was referring to the cryptic mystery that lay ahead of him. Accidentally, however, captured by his profane statement, is the essence of the nexus that binds together heritage, literary and screen tourism (HSLT); it contains the existence of a storyline underpinned by the co-creation of memory, history and heritage, conveyed through literary and screen mechanisms, which despite being subject to intense criticism for its inaccurate portrayal of history, has stimulated tourism to Paris and to a range of heritage attractions featured, including the Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland (Martin-Jones, 2014). The Da Vinci Code, of course, is not an isolated example of such a nexus; most countries have tapped into such demand and are fully exploiting the selling and retelling of the past, as well as using screen and literary links to attract tourists. For example, tours are offered to the film locations of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Kefalonia) and The Lord of the Rings (New Zealand). The ‘English Riviera’ (southwest England), the birthplace and home of Dame Agatha Christie, and various locations around London including Baker Street and the Docklands which provide the setting for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’ mysteries, are marketed to visitors who are keen to discover the many places featured in these two famous crime writers’ books and their subsequent film and TV productions.

Not surprisingly, HSLT is of huge economic, social and political significance to many tourist destinations, reflecting the rapid growth of special interest travel since the 1990s. Indeed, during this decade heritage was one of the most significant and fastest growing components of tourism (Aluza et al., 1998; Herbert, 1995), accounting for almost 40% of all international trips undertaken (UNTWO, 2004). More recently, heritage and culture have become closely integrated with other tourism sectors (UNTWO, 2014a) such as screen and literature, reflecting the diverse ways in which tourism is being produced and consumed by tourists (Richards, 2014). Despite this, few books have been published that focus on heritage tourism per se but that also incorporate detailed analysis of its interconnections between two overlapping but distinctive forms of tourism, namely screen and literary tourism. Such an oversight is remarkable given that HSLT has been an important leisure activity and area of scholarly research since the 1990s (Beeton, 2005; Prentice, 2001; Timothy & Boyd, 2003). Moreover, a multidimensional nexus exists between these three forms of tourism based upon a number of commonalities (Figure 1.1). First, they share many characteristics, such as their cultural relevance and association with cultural tourism, their historical and/or contemporary links, their connection with real and/or fictional events, places or people, and their influence on the negotiation of identities.

Figure 1.1 Interconnections between heritage, screen and literary tourism

Source: The authors (2017).

Secondly, while experiences now lie firmly at the heart of the tourism industry, because HSLT often requires tourists’ involvement in the consumption of reconstructions of aspects of the past and present, fictional and real worlds, arguably service-dominant logic (S-DL) is particularly relevant to all three, as the tourist inevitably plays a critical role in the co-creation of the experience. Thirdly, given the role of the tourist in shaping the experience, HSLT commonly exhibit a host of similar management, marketing and development issues including, for example, authenticity and historical distortion, interpretation, and beneficial and adverse visitor impacts. It is the existence of this nexus which situates screen and literary tourism within the broader context of heritage tourism (Martin-Jones, 2014; Sakellari, 2014), and which necessitates detailed examination within a single text.

Thus, this book addresses the relative lack of publications which examine HSLT together, by providing a comprehensive understanding and evaluation of these three forms of tourism in the context of global tourism development. In particular, it aims to:

(a)enhance knowledge of the relationships between HSLT;

(b)analyse the demand and supply of HSLT;

(c)critically review the development, marketing and management of HSLT in global settings;

(d)comprehensively examine the main issues and concepts relating to HSLT; and

(e)ascertain the future implications of the main issues affecting HSLT.

It begins with this introductory chapter which sets the context for the book, detailing and justifying its theoretical underpinning and the major themes that are discussed. The meaning and nature of HSLT will be examined and their associated products detailed. Then the HSLT nexus will be analysed and the relationships between these three distinct but overlapping forms of tourism will be considered. Arising from this nexus are a number of challenges which relate to the role of the consumer in the co-creation of the tourist experience, and the implications this has for the development, marketing, interpretation, consumption and the planning and management of HSLT.

The Meaning and Nature of Heritage, Screen and Literary Tourism

Defining concepts is never an easy task and providing individual definitions of HSLT is no exception, primarily because their meaning and nature has been widely debated (Garrod & Fyall, 2001; Hewison, 1987; Nuryanti, 1996; Poria et al., 2001; Prentice, 2001; Timothy & Boyd, 2003), as is evident in the following discussion.

Heritage tourism

Much of the difficulty surrounding the definition of heritage tourism stems from controversy linked to exactly what constitutes heritage, and thus a multitude of definitions have been proposed. For example, according to Ashworth and Tunbridge (1996: 105), heritage is ‘the contemporary use of the past … the interpretation of the past in history’. Meanwhile, heritage may be considered to consist of those aspects of the past which people today value; heritage resources may have intrinsic qualities such as age, but the value placed on them depends on the people who use them (Prentice, 1993; Timothy & Boyd, 2003). While it appears that most researchers accept that heritage is linked to the past and that it represents some sort of inheritance which is passed down to current and future generations, both in terms of cultural traditions and physical artefacts (Nuryanti, 1996; Timothy & Boyd, 2003), since not all heritage is kept, it thereby relates to those elements of the past a society wishes to keep. Such a view infers that heritage is selective, as society does not value all heritage and instead it is filtered through a value system which changes over time and space and across societies (Timothy & Boyd, 2003). This changing value attachment to heritage is illustrated by the example of the American Wilderness. Prior to the 18th century this environment was viewed as a dangerous, reviled place, but since the romanticisation of nature in the 18th century, this and other similar landscapes are now apprecia...