The othering of Welsh persons was a recurrent feature of English home tour travelogues throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet, in the eighteenth-century English popular imaginary, the Welsh landscape acquired new meanings as a locus of picturesque topographical beauty. Against this background of anterior travel accounts proclaiming Welsh social otherness and visual praise of Waless ecological picturesque beauty, William Daniell and Richard Ayton defined the objectives of their travels around the entire coast of Great Britain culminating in their 1814 travelogue, Voyage Round Great Britain.
While few scholars have given more than a passing glance to Ayton and Daniells first travelogue, there has been consensus that it was a romanticist hymn to the insularity of a nation following the tumult and tribulations of the Napoleonic Wars. I argue that Aytons text and Daniells accompanying aquatints did not delineate the margins of the Island in order to reveal coastal Britons as a metonym for the social variation of a single, homogenizing British populace. They located social difference, the sublime horrors of the coast, and neglected spaces in Britains wildest parts in order to illuminate that there was little coherence to Britishness. Aytons text identified two antithetical definitions of coastal Britain: the pristine, neglected sublime coast of deadly rocks and unadulterated Welsh villages, as opposed to the terrain-blighting metal works and picturesque pleasure spaces frequented by metropolitan holidaymakers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-04132015-195730 |
| Date | 14 April 2015 |
| Creators | Rasico, Patrick David |
| Contributors | Humberto Garcia, Samira Sheikh, Catherine A. Molineux, Peter Lake, James Epstein |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-04132015-195730/ |
| Rights | restricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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