Jeudi 24 mars 2022, 17h-18h30
Maison de la recherche
28 rue Serpente, Paris 6e, salle D421
Nigel Leask (University of Glasgow)
Globalizing the Highland Tour: Ossian, Earth History, and ‘Fingal’s Cave’.
In this paper I reflect on themes connected with the 18th century Highland Tour, notably Ossianic enthusiasm, global networks, geology, and the dawn of the carbon age. I will discuss two illustrated travel accounts, both the work of naturalists and Ossian enthusiasts, that established ‘Fingal’s Cave’ as the ultimate destination of the romantic tour. The first is English naturalist Joseph Bank’s journal account of his ‘discovery’ of Staffa on the course of his voyage to Iceland in 1772, published in Thomas Pennant’s Voyage to the Hebrides (1774). The second is French vulcanologist Barthelemy Faujas de Saint-Fond’s Voyage en Angleterre, en Ecosse, et aux Iles Hebrides (1797) narrating his tour to Staffa a decade after Banks in 1784, and exploring some of the transformations wrought on his narrative by geological and political revolutions.
Nigel Leask occupe la Regius Chair of English Language and Literature à l’université de Glasgow. Il travaille sur de nombreux thèmes comme la figure de Robert Burns, l’orientalisme romantique, les récits de voyage et l’empire ou encore la littérature anglo-indienne de la période romantique. On lui doit notamment Old Ways, New Roads, Travels in Scotland 1720-1832 (Birlinn, 2020), Philosophical Vagabonds: Pedestrianism, Politics, and Improvement on the Scottish Tour (University of South Carolina Press, 2019), Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late-18th Century Scotland (Oxford University Press, 2010), Curiosity and the aesthetics of travel writing, 1770-1840: from an antique land (Oxford University Press, 2002).
Contact: jean-francois.dunyach@sorbonne-universite.fr