Virtual Dark Tourism

This book takes the concept of -dark tourism--journeys to sites of death, suffering, and calamity-in 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 past-or, what we think we know about it-is shaped daily by such imagined journeys as these.

Kathryn N. McDaniel is Andrew U. Thomas Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History, Philosophy, and Religion at Marietta College, USA. A British historian specializing in intersections between popular culture and history, she is also co-editor of Harry Potter for Nerds 2.

1. Introduction, Virtual Dark Tourism: Disaster in the Space of the Imagination.- 2. "Some Lingering Influence in the Shunned House": H. P. Lovecraft's 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 Willis's 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.- 8. Thanaviewing, the Aokigahara Forest, and Orientalism: Rhetorical Separations between the Self and the Other in The Forest.- 9. Experiencing Rwanda: Understanding Mass Atrocity at Nyamata.- 10. Hurricane Katrina Goes Digital: Memory, Dark Tours, and YouTube.- 11.A Virtual Dark Journey through the Debris: Playing Inside the Haiti Earthquake (2010).- 12. Surviving the Colonial Blizzard: The Alaskan Native Game Never Alone as a Walkthrough in Cultural Resistance.- 13. Virtually Historical: Performing Dark Tourism through Alternate History Games.- 14. Remembering Fictional History and Virtual War in EVE Online.