This book brings together an explicit linkage between empirical and theoretical perspectives on tourism and discourse. A broad social semiotic approach is adopted to analyze a range of spoken, written and visual texts providing a unique resource for researching and teaching tourism in the context of communication studies.

Acknowledgements Contributors Annette Pritchard and Adam Jaworski: Introduction: Discourse, Communication and Tourism Dialogues Part 1: The Semiotics of Tourist Spaces, Landscapes and Destinations 1 John Urry: The ‘Consuming’ of Place 2 Kelly Davidson: Alternative India: Transgressive Spaces 3 Annette Pritchard and Nigel Morgan: Representations of ‘Ethnographic Knowledge’: Early Comic Postcards of Wales Part 2: The Discursive Construction and Representation of the Tourist Experience 4 Uta Papen: Exclusive, Ethno and Eco: Representations of Culture and Nature in Tourism Discourses in Namibia 5 David Dunn: Venice Observed: The Traveller, The Tourist, The Post-Tourist and British Television Part 3: Identities on the Move 6 Adam Jaworski and Sarah Lawson: Discourses of Polish Agritourism: Global, Local, Pragmatic 7 Camille C. O’Reilly: Tourist or Traveller? Narrating Backpacker Identity Part 4: Performance and Authenticity 8 Stephen Doorne and Irena Ateljevic: Tourism Performance as Metaphor: Enacting Backpacker Travel in the Fiji Islands 9 Nikolas Coupland, Peter Garrett and Hywel Bishop: Wales Underground: Discursive Frames and Authenticities in Welsh Mining Heritage Tourism Events 10 Chris Kennedy: ‘Just Perfect!’ The Pragmatics of Evaluation in Holiday Postcards Index

The book offers an important contribution to the burgeoning field of tourism studies and should, as much for its uniqueness as for the success of its individual essays, prove a point of departure for further work in the field.