5.1 Literary Tourism

public spaces to foreground and display artistically (and culturally) significant crafts and artefacts to an audience of passers-by. 13

A further example of tourist and local interest/beliefs converging though art is discussed with

reference to Romania. Again, the disjunction between visitors’ focus and that of the local population is clear. Light (2007) discusses the genesis of Dracula tourism, a phenomenon which, while based in a misconceived construction of Romania/Transylvania and an inaccurate/fictionalised account of a well-regarded local historical figure, has done much to place Romania (Transylvania) ‘on the map’ as a visitor destination. The genesis of Dracula tourism began when Romania was still a communist

country, while little was known of Dracula there, Western interest in the fictional nobleman’s origins was expanding; prompting a New York based travel company to approach the head of the Romanian

tourist office in the same city with the idea of creating an in-country tour (Light, 2007:755). The

suggestion resulted in ‘the production of an 18-day package entitled Spotlight on Dracula: An Adventure in Transylvania’ (Light, 2007:755). Creation of the tour gave rise to a situation whereby

the Romanian leadership had to decide whether to exploit the economic potential associated with

the popularity of notions of Dracula, vampires and the supernatural even though such ideas were

‘fundamentally at odds with the country’s political identity as a socialist state’ (Light, 2007:755). At

this time, Romania was attempting to build its profile as a potential travel destination on the basis of

its socialist achievements the Dracula discourse was not only antithetical to this objective, it further

embedded ‘long-established ways of seeing Romania that were an inseparable part of the Western

Dracula myth. [Thus] [t]he country found itself represented in ways that were not welcome both

over which it had little influence’ (Light, 2007:756). There was little to be gained in terms of

‘reciprocal cultural benefit or understanding’ however, the economic realities facing Romania in the mid-1970s and early 1980s meant that the opportunity to earn foreign currency that Dracula tourism

presented could not easily be spurned (Light, 2007:756). Interestingly, in spite of the local unease

regarding the domestic view of Dracula and associated tourism, the Romanian authorities gradually

progressed towards a ‘combination of historic and fictional tours […] to those who expressed an interest in the Dracula myth’ (Cosma et al, 2007:42). Thus, for example, although Poienari Fortress is

‘identified’ as the model for Dracula’s Transylvanian castle, for reasons of infrastructure and

accessibility the Romanian authorities favoured Bran Castle, which has come to be identified with

the book and its protagonist (Cosma et al, 2007:42; Reijnders, 2011:232).

13 The author looks at case study examples in Hungary, Netherlands and USA.

Much contemporary literary tourism converges around sites that ‘are no longer accidents of history, sites of a writers birth of death, they are also social constructions, created, amplified, and promoted

to attract visitors’ (Herbert, 2001:313). Furthermore, this act of creation or co-production also

results from tourists’ collusion in the act of imbuing a given site with significance, whereby a site

does not have to be ‘genuine’ in a conventional sense to fulfil a role. Rather, a place can fulfil a certain expectation or association among visitors, thus it is sufficient to follow the footsteps and/or

gaze of either one’s literary heroes or the author who wrote them into existence (Hebert, 2001:314).

Arguably, it is this process of co-production that is particularly significant in terms of cultural

relations; in this type of tourism, places are framed by an interaction between the author and the tourist/reader, which then leads to the creation of a site of significance. This process is not

necessarily susceptible to the influence of the state, either domestically or nationally, but clearly has

the potential to function as an interactive space of cultural significance in which an artistic offer (in

this case, literary origin) can be showcased.

Gordin and Matetskaya (2012:63-64) discuss the deliberate integration of literary sites into Saint Petersburg’s cultural offer demonstrating how interest in a renowned writer/ cultural figure can be

positively claimed and the gaze of the visiting tourist directed to specifically curated sites. They note

that ‘nowadays, tourists can familiarise themselves with the distinguished cultural and literary

history of the city though specialised literary tourists’ programmes. [Fifteen] literary museums

devoted to the life and work of famous Russian writers and poets are included in special tourist

routes. Among these are the Anna Akhmatova Museum […]. The St Petersburg Nabokov Museum, the Dostoevsky Museum, the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) and some others. One

of the new options available to tourists is city tours conducted by a famous literary character’. Hoppen et al (2014:38) describe an avenue though which literary tourism and digital technology can

merge in ‘the virtual world of the internet and mobile phone applications.’ An example of such

elision would be ‘’Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh,” a free app commissioned by the author’s publishers that serves as a virtual guided tour of the stories and […] characters’ (Hoppen et al, 2014:38).

While the benefits of such tourism for cultural relations as ‘good cultural relations’ are clear, the gains for cultural relations termed as ‘mutually beneficial relations with a closer alignment to aspects

of cultural diplomacy’ are perhaps less easy to clearly discern. However, the contribution to levels of tourism is clearly one way in which such exchanges are significant both in terms of ‘showcasing’ a country’s artistic/creative offer and deriving benefit for cultural relations. Arguably, the process of

co-production evident in the selection and construction of sites of literary tourism only strengthens

their contribution to cultural relations. The fact that both literary and cultural heritage tourism is