Tourist fiction and its peculiarities in English literature (ID:481519)

INTRODUCTION In the course of the nineteenth century the study of literature was professionalized. There was a concerted attempt to make the study of literature an academic pursuit, ‘a particular branch of learning or science’, to turn it into ‘literary studies’ or, as it was called in German, Literaturwissenschaft. This attempt was ultimately successful in the sense that literary studies became a recognized and established discipline within the new Humboldtian kind of university. However, this success brought troubles of its own. Among other things, the arrival of the academic discipline of literary studies not only required a method of study but also a determinate field of study. In order to delimit such a field, a clear and well-defined concept of literature was needed. This meant that academic literary studies would have to transform, for its own specific purposes, such concepts as ‘literary work’ and ‘literary text’ as well as the concept of ‘literature’, from broad, vague, non-theoretical, everyday notions into something like well-designed theoretical tools. Though it has not always been recognized, this transformation has presented a major theoretical problem for literary studies, and it is arguable that to this day no satisfactory solution has been found. The intricate connection between literature and tourism has had a long history, most notably in the successful story of how Penguin paperback editions started in 1934 as Allen Lane was standing on a platform in Exeter after paying a visit to Agatha Christie, and discovered there were no good titles on offer for the journey. Since then, studies have shown that travellers at airports, railway stations and bus terminals tend to buy newspapers but also novels, or bring books from home on their journey. In addition, tourists most often consult guide books and maps to discover more facts about the city they will visit. However, Michel de Certeau states: “What the map cuts up, the story cuts across. In Greek, narration is called ‘diegesis’: it establishes an itinerary (it ‘guides’) and it passes through (it ‘transgresses’)” (De Certeau, 1984: 129). Therefore, it can be said that it never suffices to use a map to navigate one’s way through the city, as the city will remain merely in one dimension. The ultimate way to fully comprehend a place is to know it also through literature that is set there, and by imagining characters and events they participate in, the reader constructs a place as well. The actuality of the work is motivated by the fact that it is a research within the new branch in literature which is developing, with systematizing the knowledge about fiction at all. It is also presupposed by the interest towards the problems of tourist fiction in English literature. Scientific novelty of the paper consists in frame structuring of what is tourist fiction and the peculiarities of its functioning in modern fiction. The object of the analysis is characterization of the definition of tourist fiction and its peculiarities in English literature. The subject of the analysis is the structural peculiarities of the tourist fiction books. The aim of the work is to analyse and systematize the knowledge about tourist fiction in the English language picture. To fulfill the aim the following tasks are set: – to analyze what is the fiction; – to reveal the essential characteristics and peculiarities of tourist fiction; – to present its structure. To achieve our aim we applied the following methods: – method of contextual and conceptual analysis – frame modeling – lexicographic description The paper consists of an introduction, two chapters, conclusion and the list of references. The first chapter provides the essential terms used in the research, gives the definition of fiction and its types, singles out the main criteria. The second chapter presents the term tourist fiction and its main characteristics. The conclusion summarizes the results of the research.