The Discourse of Advertising explores the language of contemporary advertising. Cook argues that advertisements are always in complex interaction with the texts around them, with music and pictures, and with the people who make and experience them. This second edition addresses contemporary advertising in the context of current changes in communication. Advertisements span a range of mediums from billboards to email and the author sensitively analyses their social functions and effects on the individual. New advertisements include those for Barnardos and the Royal Navy, Philips, Wonderbra and...

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Using a wide-ranging variety of texts the author reviews and evaluates a broad range of approaches to textual commentary, introducing the reader to the fundamental distinction between actual' and virtual' worlds in critical practice.