CECS Autumn Workshop: the Grand Tour in Britain and Ireland

Participants include: John Barrell,John Bonehill, Mary-Ann Constantine, Stephen Daniels, Jonathan Finch, Harriet Guest,  Donna Landry, Sarah Monks, Alison O'Byrne, Finola O'Kane, and Jim Watt.

Travel for pleasure or health in Britain and Ireland first became widely available to the affluent middling classes in the eighteenth century. For much of the period 1700-1830 Britain was at war with at least one of its continental neighbours; possibilities for European travel were severely restricted, and tourism within Britain and Ireland flourished. What did this newly accessible and eagerly grasped freedom to roam mean to the domestic tourist; how did the pictorial representation of journeys or sites shape their sense of themselves or of the country in the crucial period of its transition to becoming a modern and united kingdom?

The workshop will provide a forum for discussing a series of images relating to tourist travel in Britain and Ireland in the period. Each speaker will select an image, or perhaps a series of images, to consider, and offer a brief exploration of its possibilities before opening the floor to discussion.

Programme

Printer-friendly version Grand Tour Conference Programme 2011 (MS Word , 15kb)

 9.30   Registration and Coffee

10.00 Welcome

Mary Ann Constantine (University of Wales CAWC), 'Curt, frittered fragments': Thomas Pennant's Tour in Scotland (1772)

Alison O'Byrne (York), Calton Hill, Edinburgh

11.15-11.30 Coffee

Jim Watt (York), Gothic Tourism: William Bellers, 'South-East View of Netley Abbey, near Southampton' (1774)

Sarah Monks (UEA), Turner and Vagrancy

1.00-2.00 Lunch

John Bonehill (Glasgow) and Stephen Daniels (Nottingham), 'Where Nature & Art has had an equal share': Thomas Sandby and Nottingham

Donna Landry (Kent), Patriotic Tourism in Kent, 1799, and Paul Sandby's Horses: Speculation and Marginalia

3.00-3.15 Break

Jonathan Finch (York), The Farmer's Gaze: an alternative persepective on the Irish Grand Tour

Finola O'Kane (UCD), Reluctant Tourists: Visiting absentee landlords and their shifting views of eighteenth-century Ireland

4.15  Concluding discussion

How to register

Registration: The registration fee is £12.00. Please go to the university online store to pay online.

Members of the University of York : Registration is free, but please email cecs1@york.ac.uk to register. Lunch (optional) is £5.00.