Procuring Snakes: Thomas Pennant and recent scholarship in Welsh writing of the long eighteenth century

Abstract

AbstractThis article surveys recent developments in the field of Welsh writing in English in the long eighteenth century. Drawing on the findings of the research project “Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour 1760‐1815”, it sets new work on Pennant and his networks in the context of ongoing research into a number of fields within eighteenth‐century Wales, including political history, literature and science, Wales's bilingual literary inheritance, place and cartography, gender and sexuality, visual culture, print and manuscript, and the digital turn. It proposes Pennant as a useful but underused point of entry to many of these fields, given the extraordinary range of his writing career.