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 (1726-1798). Offering a truly multidisciplinary range of perspectives, it explores the complex networks of informants who helped Pennant undertake and write-up the journeys behind his widely-read Welsh and Scottish 'Tours'. `Weaving together science, history, antiquarianism and art, this stimulating collection of essays amply demonstrates Thomas Pennant's centrality to a broad range of British Enlightenment debates and discourses, especially those relating to Britain's so-called 'Celtic Fringe'. At the same time, it underscores the epistemological importance of travel and travel writing in the late eighteenth century.' - Carl Thompson, Senior Lecturer in English, St Mary's University, UK 'Enlightenment Travel and British Identities shows why Thomas Pennant was more than a "curious traveller", revealing his literary, scientific and antiquarian concerns. Enriching our understanding of Pennant's Scottish and Welsh tours and how travel made truth, these engaging essays illuminate the making of historical identities in an age of intellectual reform.' - Charles W. J. Withers, Ogilvie Chair of Geography, School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, UK 'This important and thought-provoking volume persuasively argues the case for a multidisciplinary approach to Pennant. Together the essays offer a fresh and subtly nuanced reading of the writings of this influential traveller and his significant contribution to home tour narratives of regional and national identity in the late eighteenth century.' - Zoe Kinsley, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Department of English, Liverpool Hope University, UK

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.