Literature as Travel Guide: Amenity Writing on Mallorca as a Twenty-First-Century Consumer Product

Abstract

This article discusses a literary tendency which has emerged in connection with new migratory movements, popular literature and consumer culture in the context of Mallorca. This Mediterranean island receives thousands of tourists every year and currently hosts a significant number of what Laurence A. G. Moss (1994) has called “amenity migrants”, most of them from Germany and English-speaking countries. By focusing on a number of narratives produced by amenity migrants on Mallorca, this paper addresses some of the main features shared by these texts, such as their birth as consumer products for a very specific audience and their idealised view of Mallorcan culture, and contends that a central characteristic of the new trend is its hybrid nature, as it combines fiction – usually crime fiction or romance – with the kind of information expected in a travel guide for tourists.