Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour 1760-1815

好奇旅行者项目将收集、展示和分析大量与威尔士和苏格兰旅游现象有关的材料，因为它是在公元1760-1815年发展起来的。它将打开一扇窗，让人们生动而有趣地了解数十名好奇的旅行者的故事，他们前往英国的边缘，寻找原始的、风景如画的和崇高的东西--经常发现外国人和令人不安的人出人意料地靠近家乡。我们的起点是唐宁的博物学家和古物学家托马斯·彭南特(Thomas Pennant，1726-1798)的作品，他在苏格兰和威尔士(1771-1781)的开创性之旅被广泛阅读，直接启发了约翰逊和博斯韦尔等数百人的高地之旅。彭南特的“杂食性”风格从庞大的通讯员网络中汲取信息，将自然历史、古物学、文学、历史、美学和政治编织在一起。彭南特的作品经常被称为权威或影响力，但其作品本身几乎没有受到关注：档案分散，难以使用。该项目的第一个目标是将数百封来往彭南特的信件编目，并将它们呈现在一个可搜索的数据库中。这一工具将提高我们对那个时期的古董、科学和文学网络的了解，并使我们能够追踪彭南特仔细的准备和信息收集，以及彭南特本人综合和大量修改的文本的复杂发展。彭南特之旅(作为一个威尔士人，尽管怀着联合主义的同情，探索苏格兰和他的家乡威尔士)，以及它们对后来作家和旅行者的重要性，使它们成为研究1760年后威尔士和苏格兰旅行写作的理想起点，当时交通基础设施的改善和新的英国认同感促使越来越富裕的中产阶级探索他们的国家外围。数以百计的已出版和手稿的旅游经历构成了研究历史、物质文化、文学和语言的很大程度上仍未开发的资源。该项目的第二个目标是在网上提供大量未出版的威尔士和苏格兰之旅，每一本都有一个简短的背景介绍，并与一系列地图和图片链接。鉴于这一时期有关全球探索的最新工作(库克的太平洋航海；约瑟夫·班克斯的游记)，英国的平行“探索”需要进行批判性的重新评估。国内巡演是一种非常成功的类型，仅次于小说和浪漫，但相对较少的研究。然而，无论是在四个国家的层面上，还是在更大的英国背景下，它都可以说在国家历史的建设中发挥了重要作用。旅行写作通过遗址(农庄、教堂、城堡)、流行文化(语言、服装、歌曲和“民族性格”)、物体和图像(古物、风景)揭示了风景中的过去。由于山水画和古物主义通常被视为保守的形式，这一时期作为一种流派的旅游政治很少被考虑。在革命和战争时期，本土历史和凯尔特语在多大程度上颠覆了关于英国人和国家进步的更大叙事？例如，彭南特的巡回赛，尽管他的联合主义立场，很容易被吸收到威尔士和苏格兰的民族主义话语。在考虑旅游流派如何帮助创造英国历史的版本时，该项目将调查旅行者对当地凯尔特文化(诗歌和歌曲)的接触，并询问他们的感知在多大程度上受到了当代科学和艺术思想的影响。除了制作两个新的电子资源外，我们还将通过一个信息量丰富的动态网站、2本专著、文章、大量论文、会议、活动和展览来探讨这些问题。

The Curious Travellers Project will collect, present and analyse a significant body of material relating to the phenomenon of the Welsh and Scottish Tour as it developed in the years c.1760-1815. It will open a window onto the vivid and often entertaining accounts of scores of 'curious travellers' who headed for the peripheries of Britain in search of the primitive, the picturesque and the sublime - and often found the foreign, and the unsettling, surprisingly close to home. Our starting point is the work of naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant of Downing (1726-1798), whose pioneering tours in Scotland and Wales (1771-1781) were widely read, directly inspiring the Highland journey of Johnson and Boswell and hundreds of others. His 'omnivorous' style, drawing on information from an imposing network of correspondents, weaves together natural history, antiquarianism, literature, history, aesthetics and politics.Often cited as an authority or an influence, Pennant's work has received little attention in its own right: the archive is scattered and difficult to use. The first aim of the project is to catalogue the many hundreds of letters to and from Pennant, and present them in a searchable data-base. This tool will improve our knowledge of the antiquarian, scientific and literary networks of the period, and allow us to trace both Pennant's careful preparation and information gathering, and the complex development of the composite and much-revised texts of the Tours themselves.The 'transperipheral' nature of Pennant's Tours (as a Welshman, albeit with unionist sympathies, exploring Scotland and his native Wales), along with their importance to later writers and travellers, make them an ideal point from which to investigate travel-writing from Wales and Scotland after 1760, when an improved transport infrastructure and a new sense of British identity inspired an increasingly affluent middle class to explore their national peripheries. Hundreds of published and manuscript accounts of tourist experiences form a still largely untapped resource for the study of history, material culture, literature and language. The second aim of the project is to make a generous selection of unpublished Tours of Wales and Scotland available online, each with a short contextualizing introduction and linked to a series of maps and pictures. In the light of recent work on global exploration in this period (Cook's Pacific voyages; the travels of Joseph Banks) the parallel 'exploration' of Britain needs critical reassessment. The domestic tour was an extraordinarily successful genre, second only to novels and romances, but has been relatively little studied. Yet it arguably played an important role in the construction of national histories, both at a 'four nations' level, and in a larger British context. Travel-writing uncovered the past in the landscape, through sites (cromlechs, churches, castles) popular culture (language, costume, song, and 'national character'), objects and images (antiquities, landscapes). Because landscape-writing and antiquarianism are often seen as conservative forms, the politics of the tour as a genre in this period is rarely considered. How far, during a period of revolution and war, did native histories, and the Celtic languages, disrupt that larger narrative of Britishness and of national 'improvement'? Pennant's Tours, for example, despite his unionist stance, were readily absorbed into nationalist discourses in both Wales and Scotland. In considering how the tour genre helped to 'create' versions of British history, the project will examine travellers' engagement with vernacular Celtic cultures (poetry and song), and ask how far their perceptions were influenced by contemporary ideas from science and art. Besides producing two new electronic resources, we will explore these issues through an informative dynamic website, 2 monographs, articles, a volume of essays, conferences, events and exhibitions.