Fairy tourism: negotiating the production of fantasy geographies and magical storyscapes

Abstract

This research brings an original anthropological approach to the understanding of how the tourism industry negotiates the construction of elusive, magical geographies. Fairy tourism or ‘fairy hunting’ has been acknowledged since the nineteenth century, but is largely overlooked in tourism literature, despite increasing exposure to fairy motifs through multi-media platforms, including films, gaming, and literature. This study examines fairy festivals using a theoretical framework based on the novel concept of ‘liminal affective technologies,’ (LATS), that are designed to enhance transformative potentiality. An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis method is used to analyse how fairy festival producers generate approximations of Fairyland. To create fairyscapes, their organisers devise LATs, such as situating the events in places that are bucolic, mystical and connected to local folklore, and staging workshops, music, and activities, such as wish-making, using fairy-themed motifs, to reinforce the magical narrative. Yet several festival producers ‘toned down’ the troublesome or Pagan elements of the fairyscape, explaining the surreality of their events to visitors as dreamscapes.

Keywords:

• Fairy tourism
• storyscapes
• magical geographies
• liminality
• magical tourism
• literary tourism
• transmedia tourism
• Fantasy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jane Lovell

Dr. Jane Lovell is a Reader teaching tourism and events and specialising in creative destinations and heritage tourism at Canterbury Christ Church University. Her research centres on heritage consumption and production and includes authenticity, folklore, myth, legends, and storytelling; fantasy, magical, and literary tourism and film locations. She also continues to stage the light installations that she studies. She is a member of the Canterbury World Heritage Site Management Committee and an Executive Member of the British Association of Canadian Studies.

Nitasha Sharma

Dr Nitasha Sharma is a Lecturer at the Department of Geography, University of Alabama (USA). Her research broadly examines the multiple and contested representations of place and spatial behavior through projects situated in critical tourism studies. She specializes in the perception of authenticity, dark tourism, spectral geographies/haunted heritage, folklore and supernatural tourism, rituals, and sacred spaces. Her other research interests include moral and ethical issues in tourism and decolonial studies.