Publication News: 'Discovering Britain and Ireland in the Romantic Period: Grand Tours'
News
Posted on Wednesday 14 May 2025
Warm congratulations to Dr Alison O'Byrne and Professor Jim Watt on the publication of their co-edited collection.
Discovering Britain and Ireland in the Romantic Period: Grand Tours, co-edited by Alison O'Byrne and Jim Watt, also contains an essay by Jon Mee of the department, and also one by Harriet Guest, and Elizabeth Edwards (former Professor in the department and former CECS PhD student respectively).
Even as members of the social elite participated in the European Grand Tour, travellers, writers, and readers increasingly recognized that Britain and Ireland might offer sights and experiences to rival the continent. This collection examines the practice and representation of tourism on 'home' ground during the period when modern Britain was invented and became a powerful and prosperous imperial nation.
Interdisciplinary essays explore the diverse variety of tours and tourist agendas - artistic, industrial, leisure, scientific - and they address the ways in which travellers' 'discovery' of Britain and Ireland was an active and often self-critical process that potentially encompassed encounters with the alien and unfamiliar.
Considering travellers from the wider world as well as from within Britain and Ireland, contributors discuss the function of comparative reference in contemporary travel-writing, as tourists often thought with and through others as they reflected on the distinctiveness and significance of the sites that they visited.