Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character

According to the most recent edition of the popular Rough Guide to Ireland, ‘among the romantic preconceptions visitors bring to Ireland, it is their expectations of the landscape that are most likely to be fulfilled and indeed surpassed’. The secret of Ireland's appeal is to be found in the coupling of spectacular landscapes with ‘the unhurried nature of rural living’ (9th edn. 2008, p. 6). Such observations unconsciously stem from a tradition of travel-writing which originated in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has been critically studied by William H.A. Williams. His book is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on imaginative constructions of national identity, which Declan Kiberd has labelled ‘inventing Ireland’. Williams perceptively deconstructs (to borrow from Foucault) the ‘tourist gaze’, which was shaped by aesthetics of the romanticist sublime and of the picturesque, but was also inclined towards graphic reportage of poverty, often driven by a reformist agenda. The subject of travel-writing is shown to hover between self-reflection on identity and alterity, as tourists typically cast moral judgements on what they found in Ireland through comparisons with perceptions of their homeland, in a dialectic dynamic which Williams aptly names ‘Seeing Ireland, Thinking Britain’. It is also interesting to note how certain areas in the north of Ireland were frequently set aside as unique, thus contributing to the formation of a separate British-Ulster identity

Aesthetics · Appeal · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Aside · Homeland · Identity (music · Irish · Linguistics · Literature · Media studies · National identity · Pilgrimage · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Sublime · Tourism · Travel writing · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religious Tourism and Spaces · Travel Writing and Literature