The Full-Day Experience: Representing and Re‑imagining Scotland in Online Narratives of the Film and TV Location Tour

Abstract

This article analyses how Scotland and Scottishness are represented and re‑imagined in selected online texts aimed at international tourists visiting its castles, cities and landscapes that double as locations for the TV‑series and films Outlander, Harry Potter and Trainspotting. In a dialectic relationship between consumerism, secondary-world building, spatial practices and concepts such as vision and authenticity, each particular moving-image genre is accompanied by a different set of images of Scotland brought forward in these texts, largely supporting the fixed representation of banal Scottishness and its romanticized tropes, with some exceptions that challenge these images and contribute to the type of culturalism seen in contemporary Scottish literature.