Constructing Cultural Tourism: John Ruskin and the Tourist Gaze: Tourism and Cultural Change

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 .