The making of a cultural landscape: The English Lake District as tourist destination, 1750-2010

摘要

The English Lake District has long been idealized as a place of natural and pastoral beauty which has drawn artists, poets and tourists for centuries. This book effectively explores the complex making of the destination with richly written essays providing perspectives from a variety of academic fields (including history, literature, and museum studies). The book successfully identifies and illustrates how the 'key themes in the Lake District's history and identity' (p. xv) have worked both individually and together to create the Lake District as a distinctly unique tourist destination. The 12 chapters systematically deconstruct the complex physical and ideological landscape of the English Lake District by weaving together the histories of agriculture, land management, sports, literature, art, popular taste, vacation villas, and transportation in the area, while providing the reader with a deeper understanding of how each theme has manifested itself in the district over the course of the last two and a half centuries. I quite enjoyed the book and, although it does not introduce any new theories or use any particularly novel research methods, what it lacks in innovation it more than makes up for with a detailed and descriptive holistic view of the people, places, and social conditions that contributed to the making of the English Lake District as a perpetually popular tourist destination.