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beautiful posters of scenery in Switzerland, and
the water-places in France and Spain'. Could
not the people of Ireland fi nd a means of gener-
ating and disseminating equalling compelling
images of 'their Elysian Field, too'? (
Irish Tourist
,
2['New Series', 1895], p. 21). By deliberately
evoking continental destinations in Irish tourist
imagery, the sector's proponents produced nar-
ratives to prefi gure tourists' encounters with the
Irish landscape. They hoped that tourists would
develop positive predispositions towards Ireland
as a touring ground, and would be attracted to
her shores.
The tourist's Ireland was organized by many
promotional texts drawing on a vocabulary of
international tourist destinations to describe Irish
landscapes. By deconstructing the language used
by the Irish sector's promoters, this chapter
focuses on the production of destination images
during a period of intensive activity aimed at
improving the tourist infrastructure in Ireland and
promoting the country to the British tourist mar-
ket. This chapter views such activities as expres-
sions of wider, contested ideologies in which
discussions of continental models for economic
and political development were linked to ideas
for economic improvement and political pacifi -
cation in the last decade of the 19th century.
Affective, as well as perceptual, dimensions
of the tourist image have been highlighted in
studies of destination-images and place promo-
tion, which treat place as a product that is both
marketed and consumed (Nadeau
et al
., 2008).
While the consumption of such images was
heavily and critically mediated, their producers
often drew on a range of mythic sites ('Eden')
and popular holiday-grounds ('Brighton') to
develop positive dispositions on the part of
tourists to visit Irish places that were otherwise
construed as 'virgin' terrain in the popular
imagination (Nelson, 2007, p. 11) . Studies of
the contemporary production of tourist place-
images in Ireland (Tresidder, 1999; Markwick,
2001; Bruhns, 2002; Cronin and O'Connor,
2003; Sheridan and O'Leary, 2005) stress that
a broad range of 'texts' contribute to this pro-
cess. Historically, guidebooks have played a
particularly critical role in the prefi guring of Irish
landscapes for tourist consumption (Koshar,
1998; Michalski, 2004; Nelson, 2007).
This chapter draws on two genres of travel
narrative - the guidebook and the travelogue -
whose infl uence in prefi guring Ireland for public
consumption was critical during a formative
period for Irish tourism, lasting from the fi rst to
the third Home Rule debates. It also examines
the trade press to explore ways in which discus-
sions about tourist development within Ireland's
'Tourist Movement' employed continental com-
parators. By exploring, through historical case
studies, how these texts organized images of the
country and how such images were structured,
this study, building on the work of Zuelow
(2006), argues that theories and perspectives
drawn from sociology and tourism studies can
enrich our understanding of the dynamics of
Irish tourism history. In so doing, this chapter
contributes new perspectives to a burgeoning
fi eld of study, in which the lenses of social and
economic organization (Furlong, 2003), and lit-
erature and folklore (Ryle, 1999; Hooper, 2005;
Williams, 2008) have been employed to illumi-
nate the sector's relationship to late-Victorian
Irish culture and politics.
The narration of Irish tourist-destination
images usually centred on the production of
rural 'sights' that were discussed in guidebooks
such as
Black's
and
Murray's
, as well as in
railway guides (Mehegan, 2004). Nationalist
cultural politics conferred special importance on
Irish Tourist Development and
Trans-national Imagery
Current research into destination-image pro-
duction and promotion has been nourished by
the expansion of the concept of 'tourist consump-
tion' to incorporate 'visual' elements, to explore
landscapes as texts, and to theorize systemati-
cally the production of tourist-destination images
and explore them as narratives that express wider
systems and distributions of social, economic
and cultural power (Morgan and Pritchard, 1998;
Pritchard and Morgan, 2000; Ateljevic and
Doorne, 2002). Though the category has been
criticized for its diffuse quality, a number of social
scientists have proposed multi-dimensional
models of the 'tourist-destination image', which
encompass 'impressions, beliefs, ideas, expec-
tations, and feelings towards an arena . . . sug-
gesting the involvement of both cognitive and
evaluative components' (Dann, 1996).
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