Tourist discourse and carnivalesque humour in children’s television narratives: learning travel from Thomas, Peppa and the Go Jetters

ABSTRACT

This paper extends academic debates occurring in the discursive intersections between childhood studies and tourist studies. Drawing on theoretical concepts devised by Mikhail Bakhtin and Erving Goffman, it employs a critical discourse analysis that focuses on the representation of tourists in selected travel-themed episodes of three popular children’s television series. This study investigates how travel experiences and practices of touristic consumption are discursively constructed and interrogates how this tourist discourse is implicated in relationships performed by children and adults or authority figures in these narratives. The findings imply that children’s travel-themed television narratives both challenge and reinforce cultural assumptions about tourist behaviour. This paper highlights how literary devices such as carnivalesque humour and anthropomorphism are employed to convey cultural messages and touristic themes. It also demonstrates that critical discourse analysis is an effective framework for explaining and understanding the various social interactions, roles, and relationships portrayed in these narratives.

KEYWORDS:

• Children’s television
• anthropomorphism
• carnivalesque
• discourse analysis
• tourist practice
• Peppa Pig

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Deepti Ruth Azariah

Dr Deepti Ruth Azariah teaches in the Creative Writing and Digital and Social Media programs at Curtin University. She is the author of Tourism, travel, and blogging: A discursive analysis of online travel narratives (2016) published by Taylor and Francis and has previously published junior short fiction in the Indian national daily The Hindu. Her research is mainly concerned with travel writing, children’s fiction and writing in social media.