Safe Haven, Literary Paradise and Present-Day Adventureland
This chapter analyses the new interpretative frameworks offered by travel narratives published between the late 1980s and the present day. As a prelude, the chapter offers a snapshot of the ‘lost decades’ of the interwar and post-war years, when travel accounts on Wales were far less frequent than before the First World War. It explores how the trope of a hidden, undiscovered and unknown Wales has proven to be surprisingly persistent, with the continued common portrayal of Wales as a quasi-invisible unknown quantity, a peripheral site of inspiration and alterity. Once Wales resurfaced in mainstream Continental travel writing in the 1980s, it was viewed as an entity and often a country in its own right. Yet paradoxically, Wales’s increasing accessibility, through the proliferation of dedicated guidebooks and travel websites as well as improvements to its travel infrastructure, also led to the atomization and fragmentation of visions of Wales and modes of experiencing the nation. These include a sensory or physical ‘consumption’ of Wales, the ‘internationalization’ of Wales for a global visitor and a shift away from engagement with the Welsh language and its cultures, leading to their neutralization and dilution.