Constantine, Mary-Ann, “Celts and Romans on tour: visions of early Britain in eighteenth-century travel literature”, in: Francesca Kaminski-Jones, and Rhys Kaminski-Jones (eds), Celts, Romans, Britons: classical and Celtic influence in the construction of British identities, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 117–140.
- article in collection
This chapter explores the presence of Romans and Britons in the tour literature of late-eighteenth-century Britain. It argues that the deeply ingrained narratives of Classical authors such as Caesar and Tacitus offered many tourists a framework not only for reading the past in the landscape, but also the present, as the recollection of former conflicts in situ stimulated questions of loyalty and cultural diversity within a recently ‘united’ Britain. An examination of a selection of tourist accounts from the 1770s to the early 1800s shows how certain key texts, notably Thomas Pennant’s Tours of Wales and Scotland, set the historical agenda for many decades, and reveals how the power dynamics of that ancient Classical/Celtic conflict could be usefully re-animated in different contemporary political contexts.
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