About the Book
This book explores the events, attractions, and places that comprise magical tourism. It showcases magical storytelling, ecologies, realities, entities, belief systems, cultural heritage, and rituals leading to spiritual, otherworldly, enchanting, mindful, interconnected, green, and dark experiences.
The volume offers the reader insights into the exciting, popular new tourism trend of magical tourism and its over-arching attributes and tropes. Chapters feature a number of case studies and discussions including the history of magical travel, studies of affect, witch festivals, the rights of mythical animals, folkloric beasts, unmappable places that seem to retreat and slide sideways, multi-layered place folklore and mythology, portals, nexuses of meaning, fayres, festivals, identities, and cos-play. This volume addresses the challenges of sustainable futures, green heritages, commercialisation, representation, inclusion, accessibility, community ownership, magical events, beliefs, and practices and asks if there is a magical turn in research.
The book is highly relevant to those with expertise and interest in geography, tourism, hospitality and events studies, marketing, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, and heritage and cultural studies.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgement I. Introducing Magical Tourism 1. Conceptualizing Magical Tourism 2. Tracing the Roots of Magical Tourism II. Mapping Magical Stories 3. Enchanted on Dartmoor: Uncanny Experiences and More-Than-Human Affects on the Trail of ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ 4. Can You Hear the Knights Breathing? Invisible Heritage and the Magic of Alderley Edge III. Mythic Events 5. “Once Upon a Time, Somewhere in Europe…”: Mythicization and Identity Crafting in Renaissance Festivals 6. Save the Date! Witches’ Reunion Every Friday 13th: A Case Study of Montalegre (Portugal) IV. Magical Creatures 7. Messengers of Inari: Staging Red Foxes as Sacred and Magical in Japanese Captive Wildlife Tourism 8. Rights and Welfare of Mythical Creatures within Tourism: A Critical Reflection V. Magical Communities and Belief Systems 9. Myths and Destination Identity: A Case of Newars from Patan, Nepal 10. Sacred Time and Space: Magic, Immanent Epics, and Dangerous Women in Jaunsar-Bawar VI. Magical Junctures 11. Down the Rabbit Hole and Back Again: Magical Portals in Media Tourism 12. Casting a Spell over Northern Ireland: The Alchemy of Mixing Real Folklore and Heritage with the Fantasy and Magic of Game of Thrones to Create Tourism Gold 13. A Trip Amongst Spirits: Tourism, Affect, and the Supernatural in Tōno, Japan Index
About the Author :
Jane Lovell is at reader at Canterbury Christ Church University where she teaches tourism and events, specialising in creative destinations, green festivals, event experience design, and heritage tourism. Her research and publications focus on heritage and include storytelling, myth, legends and folklore, fantasy, magical, film and literary tourism, light shows, place agency, new animism, and more-than human eventscapes.
Nitasha Sharma is a lecturer at the Department of Geography, University of Alabama (USA). She is a tourism geographer whose research broadly examines the multiple and contested representations of place and spatial behavior through projects situated in critical tourism studies. She specialises in the perception of authenticity, dark tourism, folklore and heritage, magical tourism, rituals, pilgrimage, and sacred spaces.
