Reconstructing and examining reality: Literary Tourism, Film-induced tourism & Language

This special issue, which is also the first issue published under the new name of the journal (now called Dos Algarves: Tourism, Hospitality and Management Journal), brings together a collection of original research on literary tourism, film-induced tourism and language: three concepts that can shape and examine reality and are the substance that creates new worlds, portrays landscapes, nurtures emotions and expands knowledge about the world. Not so long ago, the research and practice of literary tourism – i.e. travelling to literary significant places – was a "palpable embarrassment" among scholars, making them "thoroughly uneasy" (Watson, 2006: 5, 6), although it often coexisted with an undisclosed wish to go on literary pilgrimages or participating in literary academic meetings that provided literary tours and literary readings in situ (Watson, 2006). This attitude resulted from the predominant influence of structuralism and post-structuralism (Derrida, 1976) which advocated that there is "nothing outside the text": language and texts are self-enclosed systems in which the critical connections are those between the text signifiers and not those between words and the natural objects they represent. The context was, however, never neglected (cf. Derrida, 1977) and the notion of the text without limits was present and also enhanced by reader-response criticism and the transactional theory of meaning formation (Rosenblatt, [1978] 1993; Iser [1974] 1978). Such theorists advocate that only the readers' active interaction determines the 'realisation' of the text (Iser, [1974] 1978). As such, until that interaction happens, the literary text is incomplete. This same principle seems to consciously or unconsciously motivate visitors to go on literary touring, so they fill in the gaps after the interaction between the projections of what they consider valid and the elements in space. This view transferred to tourism studies via the geographical (Herbert, 1996) and humanist (Pocock, 1987) approaches to tourism, highlighting that the experience of place aided the understanding of the literary texts. Literary tourism has, however, other motivations that involve visits to places associated with the author (e.g. where s/he lived, worked or died), and the inspiration to travel to these sites is not only to get a better understanding of the text but to feel closer to the author (Watson, 2009). Later, literary tourism expanded via the production of literary events (i.e. literary festivals) and literary places (e.g. literary parks and hotels)