Handbook on Tourism Imaginaries

This comprehensive and insightful Handbook examines tourism imaginaries; how people envision places, journeys, and encounters. In particular, the expert authors address how fictional works both feed and depend on these imaginaries by circulating spatial desires, codifying the experience of mobility, and translating the unknown into readable form.

The Handbook on Tourism Imaginaries explore how literature, film, and cultural practice co-produce and contest these imaginaries. Chapters form three complementary parts to chart the dynamic interplay between fiction and spatial experience. The first examines Fictions of Places, investigating how literary and artistic texts construct spatial identities that later become tourist destinations. The second explores fictions of tourists, turning to the travellers themselves as narrative subjects who embody the desires, contradictions, and ethics of modern mobility. The third, fictional tourism, explores how tourism becomes a fictional object by the ways it is practiced or by the mediation of virtual and augmented reality. In synthesising these dimensions, this Handbook argues for an integrated study of the imaginaries that sustain tourism as a cultural system.

The Handbook on Tourism Imaginaries is an essential resource for students and academics in tourism studies and cultural geography, as well as cultural studies, heritage studies, visual arts, communication and literature.