The Picturesque and the Beastly: Wales and the Absence of Welsh in the Journals of Lady’s Companions Eliza and Millicent Bant (1806, 1808)

In spite of a burgeoning recognition of the Welsh language as part of a wider appreciation of Welsh culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century (see Constantine 2014: 124), Home Tour writing about Wales remained largely Anglocentric (Borm, quoted in Colbert 2012: 85). The journals written by lady’s companions, Eliza and Millicent Bant, in 1806 and 1808 respectively, present a complicated view, one in which multifarious and often negative versions of Wales compete, but overall where linguistic otherness is not evident. The lady’s companions’ various and often contradictory experiences of Wales focalise around a discourse of “otherness”, with the significant exception of its language. Welsh, and furthermore the sisters’ inability to understand it, is elided from the text. The Bant sisters’ lack of comprehension and their representation of its linguistic otherness is, I suggest, instead played out through a representation of Wales as complex, multifarious and impossible to comprehend. Wales is simultaneously “beastly” and “picturesque”, a place of industry and nature, beauty and squalor

'Our own fair Italy' : women's travel writing and Italy, 1800-1844

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

"My petticoat encumbrances"; the 'female adventurer' and the north

Focussing on the northern travelogues of two women travellers from the late nineteenth century, Ethel Brilliana Tweedie’s A Winter Jaunt to Norway: with Accounts of Nansen, Ibsen, Bjornson, Brandes, and Many Others and Polar Gleams; an Account of a Voyage on the Yacht ‘Blencathra’ by Helen Peel, this article suggests that rather than presenting a polarized gendered perspective of Arctic travel, in their writing Peel and Tweedie negotiate between masculine and feminine-coded associations in order to legitimate and popularize their travels, whilst remaining within the conventions of Victorian femininity.  Of the strategies for ensuring the apparent propriety of their text, the references to clothing are highly significant on several levels. Not only could Peel and Tweedie show their adherence (or not) to conventional feminine dress through their descriptions of their clothing, they could also illustrate their relationship to other travellers and the Norwegians they encountered. Thus the ‘petticoat encumbrances’ have a double function in the text. Symbolic of Victorian conventions of femininity and their limitations on women, the adherence to sartorial norms at least indicated to readers and critics of the woman traveller’s compliance with gender conventions. This achieved, the woman travel writer had more scope to embark on her remarkable journey and to write about its potential adventures with enthusiasm as a ‘female adventurer’ and still remain within the acceptable boundaries of late-Victorian femininity

‘Non vedete. È un rivoluzione.’ [You don’t see. It’s a revolution] Edward Lear Landscape Painter and Italy

Edward Lear\u27s 1852 text Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria and the Kingdom of Naples details the author\u27s painting tours in the South of Italy during one of its periods of major political and social upheaval. The text was based on his journeys in Southern Calabria in the summer of 1847 and Basilicata in the autumn of the same year. In his travel writing, Lear attempts, through a rhetoric of the „picturesque, to construct an Italian refuge for himself; one which is static and silently „picture-like. This article considers the tensions and negotiations in this text between Lear\u27s picture-refuge and his reporting of the dramatic events of the Italian Risorgimento, which demanded his, largely unwilling, involvement

"My petticoat encumbrances"; the 'female adventurer' and the north

Focussing on the northern travelogues of two women travellers from the late nineteenth century, Ethel Brilliana Tweedie’s A Winter Jaunt to Norway: with Accounts of Nansen, Ibsen, Bjornson, Brandes, and Many Others and Polar Gleams; an Account of a Voyage on the Yacht ‘Blencathra’ by Helen Peel, this article suggests that rather than presenting a polarized gendered perspective of Arctic travel, in their writing Peel and Tweedie negotiate between masculine and feminine-coded associations in order to legitimate and popularize their travels, whilst remaining within the conventions of Victorian femininity.  Of the strategies for ensuring the apparent propriety of their text, the references to clothing are highly significant on several levels. Not only could Peel and Tweedie show their adherence (or not) to conventional feminine dress through their descriptions of their clothing, they could also illustrate their relationship to other travellers and the Norwegians they encountered. Thus the ‘petticoat encumbrances’ have a double function in the text. Symbolic of Victorian conventions of femininity and their limitations on women, the adherence to sartorial norms at least indicated to readers and critics of the woman traveller’s compliance with gender conventions. This achieved, the woman travel writer had more scope to embark on her remarkable journey and to write about its potential adventures with enthusiasm as a ‘female adventurer’ and still remain within the acceptable boundaries of late-Victorian femininity

Students’ work in creating and curating a de-colonised curriculum

An LJMU curriculum enhancement internship project, ‘Decolonising the Curriculum in English Literature’, ran in the summer of 2021 with the aim of creating a range of materials to support an international field trip on a level 5 option module, ‘Postcolonial Writing: Power and Protest’ and to generate principles and materials to support our work developing a more diverse curriculum, which would inform the Periodic Programme review of the UG English Literature Programme in Autumn 2021.  In addition to identifying the curriculum outcomes of the internship project, this paper will focus on the contribution and motivations of students who participated in the project and will outline how the student internship project promoted multi-layered learning and research. The paper will be delivered by the staff-lead for the project, Dr Kate Walchester, and two students who took a central role in the project