The island of Sardinia from travel books to travel guides. The evolution of a genre

The tourist guide, a companion to a journey, exercises a sort of maternal function (Margarito 2000). However, it is also a device for the tourism industry to unambiguously control and lead the tourist towards specific destinations (Dann 1996). The present study will focus on the evolution of tourism texts from travel books to travel guides, from the detailed description of a destination with a thorough personal involvement of the writer to texts providing more accessible, practical and objective information. Tourist guides, mainly informative texts, ultimately promote a destination and persuade the traveller to undertake a certain voyage. After introducing the concepts of the travel guide as a genre and its birth and evolution from travel literature, the present paper will focus on the main characteristics of the semiotic patterns and linguistic strategies present in a corpus of 19th-century travel books and of travel guides on the island of Sardinia.