Constructing Cultural Tourism
This book is an interdisciplinary collaboration between a literary critic and cultural historian, which examines and recovers a radical and still urgent challenge to the industrialisation of cultural tourism from the work of John Ruskin. Ruskin exerted a formative influence on the definition and development of cultural tourism which was probably as significant as that, for example, of his contemporary Thomas Cook. The book assesses Ruskin’s overall influence on the development of national and international tourism in the context of pre-existing expectations about tourism flows and cultural capital and alongside parallel and intersecting trends of the time; examines Ruskin’s contribution to the tourist agenda at all social levels; and discusses Ruskin’s significance for current debates in tourism studies, especially questions of the place of the ‘canon’ of traditional European cultural tourism in a post-modern tourist setting, and the various incarnations of ‘heritage tourism’.
Keith Hanley is Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University where he directed the former Ruskin Centre for eight years. He has written monographs on Wordsworth and Ruskin, has edited many essay collections on nineteenth-century indisciplinarity, including, with Greg Kucich, Nineteenth-Century Worlds: Global Formations Past and Present (Routledge, 2008), and co-edits, with David Thomas, the quarterly journal Nineteenth-Century Contexts.
John K. Walton is an IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Contemporary History in the University of the Basque Country, based in Bilbao. He previously held chairs at Lancaster University, the University of Central Lancashire and Leeds Metropolitan University. He has published extensively on histories of regions, identities, resorts and tourism, especially in Britain, Spain, Belgium, France and the United States, and he contributes to debates on the role of history and ‘heritage’ in the regeneration of coastal resorts.