Screen Tourism and Affective Landscapes: The Real, the Virtual, and the Cinematic

This book explores ways in which screen-based storyworlds transfix, transform, and transport us imaginatively, physically, and virtually to the places they depict or film. Topics include fantasy quests in computer games, celebrity walking tours, dark tourism sites, Hobbiton as theme park, surf movies, and social gangs of Disneyland.

How physical, virtual, and imagined locations create a sense of place through their immediate experience or visitation is undergoing a revolution in technology, travel modes, and tourism behaviour. This edited collection explores the rapidly evolving field of screen tourism and the affective impact of landscape, with provocative questions and investigations of social groups, fan culture, new technology, and the wider changing trends in screen tourism. We provide critical examples of affective landscapes across a wide range of mediums (from the big screen to the small screen) and locations.

This book will appeal to students and scholars in film and tourism, as well as geography, design, media and communication studies, game studies, and digital humanities.

Erik Champion is Enterprise Fellow at University of South Australia, Emeritus Professor at Curtin University, Australia, and formerly UNESCO Chair and Visualisation Theme Leader of the Curtin Institute of Computation. His recent books are Rethinking Virtual Places (2021), Organic Design in Twentieth-Century Nordic Architecture (Routledge, 2019), Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage (Routledge, 2016), and Playing with the Past (2011). He is editor of Virtual Heritage: A Guide (2021), The Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places (Routledge, 2019), and Game Mods: Design, Theory and Criticism (2012), and co-editor of Cultural Heritage Infrastructures in Digital Humanities (Routledge, 2018).

Christina Lee is Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at Curtin University, Australia. She is the author of Screening Generation X: The Politics and Popular Memory of Youth in Contemporary Cinema (2010), and the editor of Violating Time: History, Memory, and Nostalgia in Cinema (2012) and Spectral Spaces and Hauntings: The Affects of Absence (Routledge, 2017). Her research interests include spaces of imagination and spectrality (including screen tourism sites), popular culture, and fandom.

Jane Stadler is Honorary Professor of Film and Media Studies at The University of Queensland in Australia. She led a collaborative Australian Research Council project on landscape and location in Australian cinema, literature, and theatre (2011–2014) and co-authored Imagined Landscapes: Geovisualizing Australian Spatial Narratives (2016). She is author of Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film and Ethics (2008) and co-author of Screen Media (2009) and Media and Society (2016). Her recent research focuses on the audience’s affective responses to cinema.

Robert Moses Peaslee is Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media Industries at Texas Tech University, USA. He is the co-editor of The Joker: A Serious Study of the Clown Prince of Crime (2015), The Supervillain Reader (2020) and Web-Spinning Heroics: Critical Essays on the History and Meaning of Spider-Man (2012). He also co-edited Marvel Comics into Film: Essays on Adaptations since the 1940s (2016). Robert studies relationships between media and place, as well as popular culture, adaptation, and fandom.