THE MEDIUM TRAVEL GUIDE: SOME ASPECTS OF IT’S STRATEGIES AND GOALS

Abstract

There is no extensive secondary literature on travel guides, despite their popularity among readers and their status as one of the best-selling genres in bookstores. The medium was more thoroughly researched in the disciplines of geography, tourism and folklore, especially in the late 1980s and 1990s, although different aspects and points were deepened depending on the discipline and thus a “compact field of reliable knowledge and theories” could not be developed. (Wicke 2011: 22). Buhl (2020: 39) concludes that travel guide research is primarily concerned with the historical change in the genre from its emergence to the 20th century or attempts to create a typology of this broad, diverse genre. However, for the purpose of this research, of particular interest are the publications that refer to the ways in which the target countries are presented from an intercultural perspective; still, the number of these studies has remained insignificant to this day. The most recent and very comprehensive study comes from Gesa Wicke (2011), who fills the research gap with her study of the staging of foreignness in tourist guides to Sicily. The subject of analysis based on available research for the medium travel guide will be the travel guide form Philine von Oppeln “Nordmazedonien. Mit Skopje, Ohridsee und allen Nationalparks” (2020).