Kathryn Jones

Swansea University | SWAN · Department of Languages, Translation and Communication

The focus of travelogues shifts from the industrial to the cultural, while the advance of Celtic Studies on the Continent leads to a far deeper engagement with the indigenous culture. Many such engaged writers viewed the development of tourism, of which they were of course a symptom, as a palpable threat to the survival of Welsh culture. This refle...

This book examines the representation of Wales and ‘Welshness’ in texts by French (including Breton) and German-speaking travellers from 1780 to the present day, focusing on key points in the period of Welsh modernisation from the Industrial Revolution to the post-devolution era. Since the emergence of the travel narrative as a popular source of in...

The growth in the popularity of Wales as travel destination in the late eighteenth century is sketched, while the relative ‘invisibility’ of Wales in travel writing as well as in scholarship is noted. ‘Europe’ is presented as a fluid entity, and the ‘nationalities’ of the travellers discussed is problematized (e.g. a number of the French travellers...

This chapter covers the period when Wales’s Celticness dominated French views. It contrasts travelogues by ‘Celtomaniac’ visitors with those by travellers with other agendas, such as social justice. While industrial locations in south Wales continued to attract French interest, discussion of the Welsh language and culture is now often inseparable f...

This was a period of discovery, with many German-speaking travellers exploring the notion of Wales from a position of ignorance. Consequently, Wales is framed as a peripheral ‘other’ throughout, but nevertheless gradually establishes a presence in the German understanding of the British Isles. This is underpinned by a deeply conflicted reading. Som...

The concluding chapter draws together the book’s key themes, focusing on the various prisms – Celtic, Breton, English, sublime, Romantic, industrial, modern, touristic, colonial – through which Wales has been viewed. These distorting prisms are shown always to reflect the home culture, whether it be France’s need to reconnect with her Celtic ancest...

French texts written during the French Revolution, the period of rapid industrialization that followed it, and the 1904-1905 Welsh Revival are shown to reflect concerns in France. Following the Revolution the young Republic was grappling with the reinvention of its own past, and both the Gauls and Celts came into vogue. This is reflected in the dev...

This chapter analyses the new interpretative frameworks offered by travel narratives published between the late 1980s and the present day. As a prelude, the chapter offers a snapshot of the ‘lost decades’ of the interwar and post-war years, when travel accounts on Wales were far less frequent than before the First World War. It explores how the tro...

This book explores the representation of Wales and ‘Welshness’ in texts by French- (including Breton) and German-speaking travellers from 1780 to the present day. Since the emergence of the travel narrative as a popular source of information and entertainment in the mid-18th century, writing about Wales has often been embedded and hidden in account...

In spite of the increased profile of Welsh national identity in the post-devolutionary age, the role of travellers and in particular travel writers in representing Wales beyond its borders remains largely unstudied. This essay explores the contrasting constructions of Wales, Welsh political structures and cultural landscapes at the dawn of the twen...

This article examines attempts by contemporary female travellers to distance themselves from travel's leisure and pleasure connotations by reasserting the ethical value of travel literature. In Bienvenue en Palestine (2004), Anne Brunswic bears witness to everyday life in Israeli-occupied Ramallah; and Soifs d'Orient and Méandres d'Asie (2008) desc...

This article examines the alternative itineraries of four travel narratives by François Maspero, one of contemporary France's foremost travel writers: Les Passagers du Roissy-Express (1990), an innovative home tour through the Parisian suburbs; Balkans-Transit (1997), a journey through the southern Balkans in the spring of 1995, his autobiography L...

German-born Maren Sell's autobiographical novel Mourir d'absence (1978) underlines the necessity of moving away from the Heimat in order to speak of it, suggesting that a discussion of the local can only be attained through exilic displacement and its ensuing disorientation. Questions of German national memories and linguistic identities are addres...

This article examines literary representations of la Bataille de Paris, a pacifist demonstration by 30,000 Algerians held on 17 October 1961. This protest in favour of Algerian independence was brutally repressed by the riot police under the orders of Maurice Papon. Over forty years later, campaigners are still calling for official recognition of t...

David Scott's innovative study of the semiologies of travel is a welcome addition to the growing field of works analysing francophone representations of travel. Most previous studies in French have focused on definitions of the genre or the sociology of travel, whereas their Anglophone counterparts have concentrated on questions of exoticism and po...