Reading Between the Scenes: Cinematic Representations of Literary Tourism

Introduction

At the end of the 20th century, the traditional forms of tourism underwent a transformation in the sense that they expanded by the introduction of new postmodern tourism forms, bringing innovative offers to the marketplace. This transformation had multiple causes, but one of the most impactful was the acknowledgement that the growth of mass tourism after the 1950s did more than favouring economic benefits. It has also led to new and severe environmental degradation, adverse social and cultural impacts, and uneven distribution of benefits. Therefore, in the 1980s, the concept of sustainable development emerged, and destinations started to develop forms of special interest tourism, presenting the “micro” as a solution to the “macro” issue (Liu, 2003). One of these new forms was literary tourism, which has grown into a commercially significant phenomenon (Watson, 2006). This fast-growing niche of cultural tourism refers to travelling to places connected to a literary text or writer (Baleiro & Quinteiro, 2018, p. 31).

This chapter complements the authors’ previous studies where literary fiction and narrative interpretation were a means to understanding and providing new perspectives on travel and tourism motivations and experiences and aims to analyse literary-inspired tourism experiences depicted in two sequences of two feature films: The leisure seeker (2017, dir. Paolo Virzi) and Paterson (2016, dir. Jim Jarmusch). Two films that have not yet been examined in relation to tourism.

As far as the authors know, no previous studies focus on the cinematographic representations of literary tourism. Hence, this chapter does not draw on similar background research. Instead, this chapter brings forward an innovative approach to contribute information on the representation of literary touring and literary tourists. In studies such as this one, one of the main challenges is finding films featuring literary tourists. After thorough research on the International Movie Database, via analysis of keywords and the authors’ personal history of film viewing, two feature films were selected.

The assumption underpinning this work on literary tourism and cinema is that films are deeply embedded in other social practices. As such, they help us make sense of and communicate about the world (Sampaio, 2014, p. 185). Thus, this chapter wishes to contribute to discussing types of literary sites and landscapes, literary tourists’ motivations and experiences, and literary tourism products. To that end, the authors start by focusing on the concepts of cultural tourism, special interest tourism and niche tourism, then on the definition of literary tourism, and, lastly, on the content analysis of the two cinematic sequences in the scope of literary tourism.