Available From UC Press

The Tourist

A New Theory of the Leisure Class
Dean MacCannell
In this classic analysis of travel and sightseeing, author Dean MacCannell brings social scientific understandings to bear on tourism in the postindustrial age, during which the middle class has acquired leisure time for international travel.

In The Tourist—now with a new introduction framing it as part of a broader contemporary social and cultural analysis—the author examines notions of authenticity, high and low culture, and the construction of social reality around tourism.
Dean MacCannell is Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Empty Meeting Grounds (1992) and The Time of the Sign (1982).
"Nothing short of brilliant."—Lewis Coser