Abstract

This volume explores the relationship between tourism and travel texts and contemporary society, and how each is shaped by the other. A multimodal analysis is used to consider a variety of texts including novels, brochures, blogs, websites, radio commercials, videos, postcards and authentic tourist pictures and their meaning-making dynamics within the tourism discourse. The book looks at the ways in which these different texts have influenced how tourists and travellers have been viewed over time and how we envision ourselves as tourists or travellers. It puts forward multimodal analysis as the best framework for exploring the semiotic potential of these texts. Including examples from the UK, Malta, Canada, New Zealand, India, Jamaica and South Africa, this volume will be useful for researchers and students in tourism studies, communication and media studies and applied linguistics.

Sabrina Francesconi, who is a leading light among a new generation of multilingual Italian women academics exploring the language of tourism, has been researching the sub-field for over a decade. The result is a well-referenced, comprehensive text that examines in depth Anglophone promotional discourse from an outsider perspective in a fast-moving digital age.

Sabrina Francesconi is a brilliant young Italian scholar in tourism studies, who has already published extensively on the subject. In the present volume, the selected promotional texts pertaining to English-speaking countries are explored through a methodologically sound and stimulating approach of the verbal, visual and audio systems in the internet age.

Sabrina Francesconi is Adjunct Professor of English Linguistics and Translation at the University of Trento, Italy. Her research interests include English for Tourism, Multimodality, Multimodally Expressed Humour (MEH) and Genre Analysis.

Francesconi's outstanding book and her research during the past ten years support the shift from a purely textual approach to tourism discourse analysis toward the semiotic, offering the multidisciplinary field of tourism studies an applied linguistic approach to tourism discourse and providing valuable insights to applied linguists on relevant issues in tourism studies. As such, Francesconi's Reading Tourism Texts: A Multimodal Analysis will surely find its readership among researchers of tourism discourse. Her clear style of expression makes the book accessible to readers who may be less familiar with theories, so will also provide a useful reference to postgraduate students of applied linguistics and tourism studies.

This book serves as a timely reminder that tourism and travel texts are multimodal in nature. As such, the visual and aural dimensions of tourism communication are important and must be considered alongside the more commonly researched written texts.