Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book seeks to put a little more might behind that turn and propel heritage studies away from simpler 'two-dimensional' textual readings and narrative accounts towards engaging with experience, the sensory realm and the affective materialities and atmospheres of heritage landscapes. It considers places as affective engagements. Iconic places such as castles, ruins and sites that somehow elide modernity are thought through as sites of feeling and affect. The book problematizes the ethics of making visitors feel trauma in the context of a national loss, and here the question of commemoration radically alters the affective ecologies of locale, place and nation. It illustrates how digital documentary heritage produces new auratic environments for visitor's own affective engagements with heritage. The book focuses on purposeful in attending specifically to the theoretical potentialities of affect and emotion in the experience of heritage.