Enlightenment Travel and British Identities: Thomas Pennant's Tours of Scotland and Wales

Description

Enlightenment Travel and British Identities is the first-ever collection of essays devoted to the influential eighteenth-century travel writer, antiquarian and naturalist, Thomas Pennant. Offering a truly multidisciplinary range of perspectives, the volume explores the complex networks of informants who helped Pennant undertake and write up the journeys behind his popular Welsh and Scottish Tours. Widely read and much imitated, the Tours indisputably helped bring about a richer, more complex understanding of the multiple histories and cultures of Britain at a time when 'Britishness' was itself a fragile and developing concept. Enlightenment Travel and British Identities seeks to address the comparative neglect of Pennant's travel writing by bringing together researchers from literary criticism, art history, Celtic studies, archaeology and natural history. Attentive to the visual as well as textual aspects of Pennant's topographical enquiries, it rehabilitates a neglected aspect of the Enlightenment in relation to questions of British identity, offering a new assessment of an important chapter in the development of domestic travel writing.

Mary-Ann Constantine is Reader at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. The author of The Truth against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery (2007), Constantine has written widely on the Romantic period in Wales and Brittany. Nigel Leask is Regius Chair in English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow as well as a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is the author of Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (2010), which won the Saltire Prize for best research monograph in 2010.

With contributions from scholars working in the fields of literature, history, archeology, art history, and history of science, the collection makes a strong case for Pennant's importance to late eighteenth- century Britain in a variety of areas. -Katherine Hedane Grenier, The Citadel, Eighteenth-Century Scotland (the annual newsletter of ECSSS) The essays in this collection reflect and bring to life the variety of topics to be found in Pennant's 'Tours', and his treatment of them. Appropriately, given that visual depiction as well as written description was very important to Pennant, this volume is well illustrated in relevant chapters, with reproductions from the 'Tours' and other contemporary images. -Edward Cole, 'Journal of Historical Geography' 60 (2018) 100-113.