Celtic censure: representing Wales in eighteenth-century Germany

Martin, A. E. (2014) Celtic censure: representing Wales in eighteenth-century Germany. Studies in Travel Writing, 18 (2). pp. 122-133. ISSN 1755-7550 doi: 10.1080/13645145.2014.895261

Abstract/Summary

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of regionalist discourse as the performative legitimation of specific frontiers, this article examines how the English traveller Samuel Jackson Pratt mediated a picture of the Welsh to late eighteenth-century readers in his Gleanings Through Wales, Holland and Westphalia (1795). This process of mediation was further complicated by the translation of this work into German as the Aehrenlese auf einer Reise durch Wallis, which appeared with the Leipzig publisher Lincke in 1798. While this work made an important contribution to German Celtophilia in the Romantic period, the German translator was careful to omit its more Sternean passages, in favour of factual narrative. Pratt's account of his travel through Wales, mediated in turn to a German audience through its Leipzig translator, therefore embodies several layers of cultural transfer that generate a complex and multifaceted image of Wales at the close of the eighteenth century.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/36598
Identification Number/DOI	10.1080/13645145.2014.895261
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > Languages and Cultures > German
Uncontrolled Keywords	Wales, regionalism, translation, travel writing, Germany
Publisher	Taylor and Francis
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