Virtual Dark Tourism Ghost Roads [Hardcover]

This book takes the concept of dark tourismjourneys to sites of death, suffering, and calamityin an innovative yet essential direction by applying it to the virtual realms of literature, film and television, the Internet, and gaming. Essays focus both on the creative construction of imaginary journeys and the historiographic and civic consequences of such memorializations. From World War II time-travel novels to Game of Thrones, and from Internet reproductions of Rwandan genocide locations to invented tragedies in futuristic domains, authors from various fields examine the purpose and influence of simulated travels to morbid sites. Designed for a wide audience of scholars and travelers virtual and real, this volume raises awareness about the many pathways through which we encounter death experiences in contemporary society. What we know about the pastor, what we think we know about itis shaped daily by such imagined journeys as these.

1. Introduction, Virtual Dark Tourism: Disaster in the Space of the Imagination

2. Some Lingering Influence in the Shunned House: H. P. Lovecrafts Three Invitations to Dark Tourism

3. Imagined ghosts on unfrequented roads: Gothic Tourism in Nineteenth-Century Cornwall

4. Through the Looking Glass Darkly: The Convergence of Past and Present in Connie Williss Time-Travel Novels

5. Cinematic Thanatourism and the Purloined Past: The Game of Thrones Effect and the Effect of Game of Thrones on History

6. Touring the Burning Times: The Rhetoric of Witch-Hunting Films, 1968-1973

7. Did Those Portly Men Over There Once Rush This Position?: Virtual Dark Tourism and D-Day Commemorations