Explorer Travellers and Adventure Tourism

Engaging, well-written and concise, this book provides a context for the tourist-traveller debate – a microcosm of social and cultural complexity where the quotidian meets the extraordinary and the economy of colonisation meets the egos of the great explorers. It is this legacy that explains our ongoing fascination with frontier adventure travel from exotic journeys through 'otherness' to space travel.

-- Paul Beedie, University of Bedfordshire, UK

In this topical volume, Jennifer Laing and Warwick Frost venture into uncharted conceptual territory to portray the socio-cultural context of explorer travel. In a comprehensive and critical review of archetypal, fictive and autobiographic narratives of the frontier traveler – including seldom depicted female adventurers – they vividly demonstrate how mediatized adventure pursuits affect a wide range of contemporary tourism experiences, also encompassing food explorers and space tourists. A long anticipated cross-disciplinary reconceptualization of the transformative journey!

-- Szilvia Gyimóthy, Aalborg University, Denmark

This book is absolutely stunning. No dull moments while reading it. Its easy writing style, enlightening and amusing citations from interviews and published texts, and the authors' own reflections tease your inner explorer and adventurer. Look out – your view on travelling will change while reading this meaningful text, and most likely you'll start planning your own expedition.

-- Reidar Johan Mykletun, University of Stavanger, Norway

The purpose of this review is to give the potential reader a brief sense of the range of issues and of travellers discussed so brilliantly
in this book. It would make a fine addition to the academic literature in any tourism library, personal or institutional. And it is, quite
simply, a good read.

-- Paul F. Wilkinson, York University, Canada * Tourism Management 48 (2015) 3