COASTAL ROUTES · Travel, Environment, Sustainability: A Literary and Cultural History of Irish and Scottish Coastal Routes
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-09-01 → 2022-08-31
- EU contribution
- €212,934
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Travel, Environment, Sustainability: A Literary and Cultural History of Irish and Scottish Coastal Routes
COASTAL ROUTES is a timely project in our contemporary moment of environmental change and climate crisis as rising sea levels and flooding, coastal erosion and loss of habitats are transforming the Atlantic coastlines. The project asked how the recovery of an historical archive of travel texts about Ireland and Scotland’s Atlantic shorelines can speak to anticipated future developments in tourism by analysing the competing aesthetic and economic values attached to coastscapes. Travel writing was the principal genre for representing the natural world during the Romantic period that offers the opportunity to unlock the tensions between aesthetic, economics, and natural heritage that often remain hidden in other genres. Examination of dominant narratives as expressed in travel texts, with their lasting relevance for today’s branding of coastal routes, offers new knowledge about the relationship between cultural heritage and environmental protection. The Romantic-era framing of the “wild” and “sublime” landscapes of the Highlands and coasts informs their interpretation even now, with Ireland’s 2,500-km coastal route marketed as the “Wild Atlantic Way” since 2014, followed shortly after by Scotland’s tourism strategy for the “North Coast 500”. By turning an EH lens on travel writing, COASTAL ROUTES counters the tendency to foreground nation-centred and imperial narratives, or Romantic aesthetics of nature and the sublime. The project advanced the field by addressing ideas of abundance, wilderness and waste, and their relation to contemporary concerns of sustainability, development, and natural heritage. The primary research questions for this project were: 1. What can travel literature tell us about the relationship between people, place, and environment? 2. In what ways do travel narratives shape ecological awareness within the wider cultural and political context? 3. When did modern ideas of wilderness and uncultivated land take shape, and how do Scotland and Ireland differ on this front? 4. How does tourism, as an activity and an industry, conceptualise and shape the environment in these most western regions of the Atlantic archipelago?
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
COASTAL ROUTES explores the deep history of human-environment relationships along the environmentally fragile Atlantic coasts of Ireland and Scotland through an interdisciplinary analysis of travel writing between 1770 and 1840. Offering the first comparative study of a neglected archive of Irish and Scottish travel texts from the period, COASTAL ROUTES will energise literary criticism beyond a nation-centred and imperial context by remapping the environmental geography of archipelagic Romanticism. It innovatively combines Environmental Humanities, Archipelagic Criticism and Geocriticism in order to contrast and examine the ways in which tourists construct landscape as a resource; consider how they reflect changing attitudes and values; and demonstrate how environmental narratives grew up around particular locations. COASTAL ROUTES makes a timely contribution to the UN’s Agenda 2030 as it sits at the nexus of Goals relating to sustainable economic growth, consumption and production patterns as well as sustainable development of marine resources. Understanding the historical development of culturally-informed values of the environment as developed in Romantic travel writing allows critical reflection on contemporary practices and future directions. As part of the dissemination plan, project findings will be communicated to the public via social media and a virtual exhibition. COASTAL ROUTES aims at intersectoral knowledge transfer by creating two travel e-brochures made freely available to Visit Scotland and Tourism Ireland for wider dissemination. Through the action, the ER will widen her research expertise, establish a new international network, and develop new skills in public engagement and impact to foster interdisciplinary and intersectoral knowledge transfer to strengthen the knowledge-base of the European Research Area.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH · EdinburghCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union