Literary Tourism: The Meaning of 'Host-Guest' Interaction in Balinese Literary Short Stories

The development of tourism in Bali with the intensity of socio-cultural impacts has inspired writers to create literary works, both in Indonesian and in the Balinese language. This study examines the meaning of the interaction between host and guest (Balinese and Westerners) that become the themes or sub-themes of short stories written by Balinese writers. The analysis is focused on answering the following three questions, namely (1) what is the personal background and reasons for host-guest interaction? (2) to what extent does the personality background determine the nature of the interaction, conflict or harmony?; (3) what is the meaning of host-guest interaction in the context of the development of Bali tourism and the discourse of the importance of Bali maintaining its cultural identity? Research data in the form of short stories written by Balinese writers, both Indonesian and the Balinese language were selected selectively (purposely) according to the research topic. In-depth interviews were also carried out with several authors to find out the background to the creation of their short stories used for interpretation. These qualitative data are analyzed with the literary tourism approach, especially a combination of two theories, namely interpretive content analysis theory which is prevalent in literature studies and host and guest theory which is commonly applied in tourism studies. The results of the study are expected to contribute to multi-disciplinary research, especially between literary and tourism studies.