10. From letters to guidebooks

A concern of Ruskin, guidebook writing, has remained relatively marginal to critical discourse. Yet, he produced a well-known work addressed to travellers to Italy, Mornings in Florence, that can be termed a ‘guidebook’. The paper analyses this text with a view to investigating how heritage sites and places are construed from the writer’s point of view in the context of the development of modern travel guides from diaries and personal notes to works addressing a wide audience of tourists. It is here assumed that the perception and textual construction of space varies in accordance with shifting cultural frameworks and world views. To investigate the text in electronic form the phraseological approach developed by Francis and Hunston (2000), Stubbs (2001) and Hunston (2008) has been be adopted.