Celts and Romans on Tour

2020 ◽  
pp. 117-140
Author(s):  
Mary-Ann Constantine
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
Selection Of

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.

Late Novels

2018 ◽  
pp. 67-100
Author(s):  
Hugh Adlington
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Blue Flower ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Romantic Poet ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Ways Of Thinking

This chapter examines the four ‘late’ novels that are the peak of Penelope Fitzgerald’s achievement as a writer: Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower. Each novel is, at least superficially, a work of historical fiction in that it is set in the past: in 1950s Italy, in revolutionary Russia, in Edwardian England, and in late-eighteenth-century Germany respectively. But history is decidedly not the defining feature of these novels. Rather, as this chapter shows, all four works are characterized by their bold experimentation with narrative form and style, reflecting an intense concern with profound questions of body, mind and spirit that culminates in Fitzgerald’s haunting masterpiece, the story of the idealized yearning of the German Romantic poet Novalis both for Sophie von Kühn, his ‘heart’s heart’, and for revelation. Through close analysis of Fitzgerald’s methods of research, composition and editing, this chapter proposes fresh ways of thinking about the stylistic means by which these late novels create fictional worlds that expand to fill the reader’s imagination, and even appear to possess an existence independent of the novels themselves.

John Bull and the American Revolution: The Transatlantic Afterlives of Arbuthnot's Character

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-69
Author(s):  
Leah Orr
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
British Government ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
Newspaper Articles

AbstractHow did the character John Bull come to be so widely recognized as a stand-in for the British government or people? John Arbuthnot created the character in 1712 in a series of five pamphlets criticizing the British role in the War of the Spanish Succession, and for fifty years the character was mentioned only in references to Arbuthnot. In the late eighteenth century, John Bull began to appear in newspaper articles relating to other political contexts, eventually appearing in satires on all manner of British policies and characteristics, from taxes and the economy to xenophobia and imperialism. This essay argues that the American colonists adapted the character to their own purposes. This analysis contributes to the understanding of the content, political engagement, and spread of the press in eighteenth-century Britain and America. It also reveals one way that writers about British national identity and its symbolism accounted for an increasingly diverse global empire that could not be represented adequately by a single figurehead.

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