TRAVEL, TRAVEL LITERATURE AND REPRESENTATIONS OF SPACE IMPLEMENTATION STUDY: THE DOURO WINE REGION IN FOREIGN TRAVEL GUIDES FROM THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES (1845-1974)
Isabel Oliveira; Didiana Fachada Fernandes | 71-91
This study seeks to address and analyze some notions and interpretations ascribed to the term “landscape” linked to different types of travel habits, particularly in aspects that have to do with the construction of a historical landscape and with elements that will provide people with an image of the type of human organization that prevailed in the past. Some authors argue that travel literature, although often neglected, has been, over the centuries, as popular as any other type of literature. Throughout history this literary genre has been widely used as a source of information and in recent years there has been a strong increase in the amount of studies conducted on travelling and on the perception of its relevance to the knowledge of the mental attitudes that are triggered by a given geographic, social and cultural place or destination. This paper seeks to represent the space of travel through a brief, but multidisciplinary, incursion in the study of Space, a study with which one seeks to understand how to create an image of a place one will eventually be proud of. Could it perhaps be said that space and culture are undergoing some sort of transformation? As far as we are concerned, what really matters is the fact that spaces of representation are associated with any possible experience people have been through, because what we truly want to grasp is the representation of a certain space provided by sources that originate from the past – travel guides that generate stereotyped "guided spaces" that are part of a national or regional identity and are reflected in textual information. How can travel guides work as sources of information that can be used in a study? Will they be reliable? This will be the way the specific characteristics of these sources will be henceforth addressed and analyzed, a way that will allow us to achieve the credible theoretical framework we need. Travel guides suggest the choice of certain paths and highlight objects so that visitors may focus on what is essential. We will assume that these works, despite their reductive nature, are able to offer a notion of how an image of a certain place and of its landscapes could have been shaped over time in order to meet potential visitors’ expectations and how this final product is then disseminated.
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