Abstract

From the highly influential concept of ‘staged authenticity’ discussed by Dean MacCannell, to the general claim of longing for authenticity on behalf of all Western consumers, made by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, it is obvious that the concept of authenticity is still worth considering. This ground-breaking book re-thinks and re-invests in the notion of authenticity as a surplus of experiential meaning and feeling that derives from what we do at / in places. In Re-investing Authenticity - Tourism, Place and Emotions international scholars representing a wide range of disciplines, examine contemporary performances of authenticity in travel and tourism practices: From cultural place branding to individual pilgrim performances; from intensified experiences of imaginary crime scenes to the rhetorical features of the encounter with the traumatic and; from photography performing memories of place to experiences of wilderness producing excitement, this book demonstrates how the feeling of authenticity within places is produced.

This book refreshes the rather stale contemporary discussion on authenticity in tourism studies, by looking at it from new perspectives, informed primarily by post-modern approaches in geography and media and literary studies. It also opens up the wealth of current work on tourism in Scandinavia, much of which is not accessible to English language readers.

Britta Timm Knudsen is Associate Professor at the Scandinavian Department, Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research is within culture and media studies, event culture and experience economy, cultural heritage tourism and memory culture. She has recently published books and articles on realism, witnessing on TV, nostalgia, and thanatourism (http://begivenhedskultur.dk).

Anne Marit Waade is Associate Professor at the Institute of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research is within media aesthetics, visual culture, mediated tourism and market communications, and she has recently published articles on crime fiction tourism (www.krimiforsk.aau.dk) and travel series (www.tvunderholdning.au.dk) and a book in Danish on media and tourism (Jensen & Waade, 2009).