Innocence, Desire and Loathing: Visiting the Book

Dates
Wednesday 29 May 2013 (10:00-11:00)

Professor Mike Robinson will speak at the Hay Festival on Wednesday 29 May at 10am, discussing the critical, but underplayed role that fictional narratives play in shaping tourism and our understandings of places, peoples and pasts.

His talk will expose the messy boundaries between experience, identity and our back catalogue of imaginings which we can trace back to the global flows of text which wash over us.

Drawing upon various literary genres, Professor Robinson will explore how our readings and imaginings of place, absorbed from the world of fiction shape our on-going agendas as tourists to the point where not only can we consider notions of genuine desire for imagined worlds, it becomes almost impossible to be wholly ‘innocent’ of places. As tourists we read the world. As readers we tour the world – a world we have already visited.

Professor Robinson is the Director of the Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage - a major inter-disciplinary Institute working with the World Heritage Site and associated museums of Ironbridge.

Tickets for this talk, and other talks featuring in the Birmingham Speakers at Hay series, are available directly from the Hay Festival.