Mitigating perceived greenwashing in tourism services: A study of tourism in English literature and the ethics of environmental representation

Abstract

Tourism services frequently associate attractive landscapes with responsible consumption, although the beauty of a destination cannot establish the environmental quality of the services operating within it. This article examines how tourism in English literature can clarify that distinction. Through comparative close readings of Jane Austen’s Sanditon, E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, it investigates the narrative production of desirable places and the suppression of inconvenient perspectives. Austen exposes the circular reasoning of resort promotion; Forster unsettles the tourist’s ownership of the view; Woolf connects apparently adventurous travel with commercial extraction and unequal interpretive authority. Read alongside scholarship on greenwashing, ecocriticism, and staged authenticity, these works support a concept of accountable tourism narration: environmental claims should specify their evidential limits, disclose relevant interests, and remain open to correction by affected people. The article proposes applications to hospitality communication and English literature teaching, while distinguishing literary interpretation from evidence of behavioural effectiveness. Its principal contribution is a method for examining how environmental innocence becomes narratively plausible, and how that plausibility might be questioned without treating all tourism communication as deceptive.