‘A Kind of Geological Novel’: Wales and Travel Writing, 1783–1819

Edwards, Elizabeth (2018) ‘A Kind of Geological Novel’: Wales and Travel Writing, 1783–1819. Studies in Romanticism, 24 (2). pp. 134-147. ISSN 1354-991X

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Abstract

This article explores the layered and multivocal nature of Romantic-period travel writing in Wales through the theme of geology. Beginning with an analysis of the spectral sense of place that emerges from William Smith's 1815 geological map of England and Wales, it considers a range of travel texts, from the stones and fossils of Thomas Pennant's A Tour in Wales (1778–83), to Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday's early nineteenth-century Welsh travels, to little-known manuscript accounts. Wales is still the least-researched of the home nations in terms of the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, despite recent and ongoing work that has done much to increase its visibility. Travel writing, meanwhile, is a form whose popularity in the period is now little recognised. These points doubly position Welsh travel writing on the fringes of our field, in an outlying location compounded by the genre's status as a category that defies easy definition.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Wales, travel writing, literature and science, geology, Thomas Pennant, manuscripts
Subjects: P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Divisions: Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies
Depositing User: Elizabeth Edwards
Date Deposited: 16 May 2024 13:55
Last Modified: 16 May 2024 13:56
URI: https://repository.uwtsd.ac.uk/id/eprint/2966

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