Rural literary ressource and participatory place building in Allier, France.
Résumé
Literary heritage tourism is a subfield of cultural tourism which concerns places or routes associated to an authors’ life or artistic production and is a good illustration of literature capacity to build place. In a postmodern context of increasing touristic offer and demand, literary tourism is often seen as a niche, an originality factor and a guaranty of authenticity by local development actors and by visitors. The present communication, consequently, is interested in this dialectic between places and literary heritage.
Our paper approaches literary heritage through a participatory action research which focuses on rural citizen associations that promote literary heritage of Allier department, France.
It also bases itself on the principals of social innovation where all participating actors recognize a necessity to act in this field of local development. All share a project of literary place building but the various literary heritage call for diversified vision of what should constitute a literary basis for the development of a local literary identity. Using focus groups and individual interviews the research finds an operational goal in producing a web site designed by the associations and with the objective of giving more visibility and accessibility to literary heritage in Allier. By uniting the territorial actors that share literary heritage transmission as their mission, the hope is to give extra value to an otherwise underexploited resource in an economically fragile rural environment. Finally, the central operational objective is the creation of a Writers trail of Allier that would connect literary places and create a long lasting dynamic in local literary tourism.