Curious Travellers: Writing the Welsh Tour, 1760-1820

Curious Travellers: Writing the Welsh Tour, 1760-1820 provides the first extensive literary study of British tours of Wales in the Romantic period (c.1760-1820). It examines writers’ responses to Welsh landscapes and communities at a time of drastic economic, environmental, and political change. Opening with an overview of Welsh tours up to the early 1700s, Mary-Ann Constantine shows how the intensely intertextual nature of the genre imbued particular sites and locations with meaning. She next draws upon a range of manuscript and published sources to trace a circular tour of the country, unpicking moments of cultural entanglement and revealing how travel-writing shaped understanding of Wales and Welshness within the wider British polity.

Wales became a popular destination for visitors following the publication of Thomas Pennant’s Tours in Wales in the late 1770s. Hundreds of travel-accounts from the period are extant, yet few (particularly those by women) have been studied in depth. Wales proves, in these narratives, as much a place of disturbance as a picturesque haven--a potent mixture of medieval past and industrial present, exposed down its west coast to the threat of invasion during the Napoleonic Wars. From castles to copper-mines, Constantine explores the full potential of tour writing as an idiosyncratic genre at the interface of literature and history, arguing for its vital importance to broader cultural and environmental studies.

Mary-Ann Constantine, Professor of Celtic Studies, University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies

Mary-Ann Constantine is Professor at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. She studies the literature and history of Romantic-period Wales and Brittany, and holds particular interests in travel writing and in the cultural politics of Britain and Ireland in the 1790s. She has led several major funded research projects and has written on Romantic-era literary forgery, narrative song, Welsh responses to the French Revolution, the British ’home tour’ and the travels of naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant.