Yeats's country and “Yeats Country”: conceptualizing literary spaces

Abstract

The year 1991 saw Dublin named as a “European Capital of Culture”; 1991 was also the year that the Dublin Writers' Museum found a permanent home in numbers 18 and 19 Parnell Square. Currently, there are 12 other attractions in Dublin designed to draw tourists interested in Dublin's literary history. What does it mean for a nation to capitalize on its literary production? Failté Ireland, currently responsible for marketing Ireland to tourists, seeks not to create the artifice of an “authentic” Ireland, but to allow tourists to experience on a more personal level what Ireland has produced. The increasing emphasis on cultural production over cultural difference belies the extent to which contemporary tourists struggle with the issue of authenticity. As Erik Cohen shows, the desire for authenticity forms a central part of the tourist experience. Considering the tourist from this perspective, my project analyzes tourist sites related to literary figures in both Ireland and St Petersburg, Russia. Exploring this form of tourism as a model for life in general, my paper asks whether tourist attractions related to literature can work against the larger process of “spatial homogenization” endemic in the postmodern era.