Chapter 5 Translating the past: literary research, public history and the heritage of Wales

Being relevant

We find ourselves in strange times. The geopolitical landscape is in turmoil, climate change is ever-more apparent and the ripple effect of the COVID-19 pandemic is yet to subside. As we seek to negotiate this seemingly endless series of obstacles, our individual mental health, societal wellbeing and core cultural values increasingly find themselves in the spotlight as a means to reset and become more resilient. We are encouraged to reflect, take time out and connect, with ourselves, with each other and, importantly, with what we have in common, not what divides us. Central to this are the ways in which we spend our leisure time, broaden our horizons and find our place in the world. The value of visiting heritage sites, art galleries and museums, exploring our family genealogy, joining book groups and finding our creative selves, is an ever-present topic in media lifestyle features. Increasingly, media content explores our shared past, through the houses we lived in, the clothes we wore and the work we did as the turn to social history reaches its logical destination: we, and our place in the world we have inherited, have become the subjects of our own personal research. Underpinning this is the broad span of the arts and humanities disciplines and the work that we as professional researchers produce as historians, musicologists, biographers and, of course, literary scholars. The study of literature – past and present – enables us to reflect on and engage with the issues that affect our daily lives. Modern languages literary research brings the added dimension of intercultural understanding, opening up new vistas and ways of understanding the interconnectedness of the world in which we live. Yet, as the arts and humanities find themselves under increasing pressure, these interdependent aspects of scholarly endeavour need championing more than ever. The question we face as experts is how to do this.

Sometimes it is that very expertise that gets in the way. We have all been there, planning a research project on a topic about which we are passionate and the value of which is patently obvious to us and our academic peers. As academics, we are trained to see the broader significance and perhaps we take that for granted. After all, arts and humanities research is all about us as humans and the world we have created for ourselves, so clearly it must be important. Then we try to explain it to someone else, over dinner perhaps or making conversation at a family event. The blank faces and conversation-stopper moments are frustrating but ultimately understandable. Most people are too polite to ask the burning question: why on earth are you working on that? Extrapolate this up to governmental level and the questions become more probing. To those beyond the arts and humanities academy, the idea of spending time, and being paid, to research in depth what appears to be an entirely random, esoteric topic, even in the best of economic times, seems outlandish to say the least. What is it all for? Why should public money be given over to such projects when there is so much else at stake? What is the point? It was partly to answer questions just like these that funding bodies and government came up with the notion of showing demonstrable impact, a move that threw the ball right back into the academic court. We, as literary researchers, faced a new challenge: to make the work we do speak to new audiences and change lives, giving it value beyond the still-crucial enhancement of human knowledge. Tricky. This dilemma is explored by Rick Rylance in his 2016 discussion Literature and the Public Good, where he describes the opposing camps:

The use of measurement data and justificatory requirements of this kind are ubiquitous in public life and rile humanistic opinion. When decision-makers demand ‘value assurance’, humanists see a category mistake. The intrinsic value of art, or scholarly learning, or abstract ideas, or faith beliefs, or one’s inwardness with foreign languages, for example, are said to be good in themselves. They demonstrate their worth by existing, and only incidentally through worldly activity stimulated by them.¹

The humanistic view outlined here has its place. After all, not all research can be immediately assigned an economic value, but that does not mean that it might not in time contribute to the development of future economies, not least through the ‘softer’ elements such as wellbeing and cultural identity. So, as for Rylance, for me the dichotomy is a false one. Some things take time for their ‘value’ to emerge. It does not mean it is not there. What our commodity-driven age lacks, perhaps, is the patience to wait. Rylance is right to argue for the role of literature (and the arts and humanities more broadly) in ensuring we are able to rebalance our view of the world and of ourselves.

Nonetheless, the arrival of ‘value assurance’ has had its benefits, however uncomfortably it might sit. We, as researchers, now behave differently. It is, I think, fair to say that many modern languages researchers struggled initially with this shift. Some disciplines – take the natural sciences or medicine – have it relatively easy when it comes to demonstrating the societal impact of their work. It is a little harder to argue when your research focus is on, say, Middle-High German poetry or the Portuguese novel. How can the study of these add value to the life in the anglophone world? To some extent, it has to do with the inherent interdisciplinarity of the methodology. Although it sits at the heart of many modern languages degrees, the combination of language and literature is not always obvious to those on the outside. Reading literature is for leisure, surely? Language is about grammar, vocabulary and translation, is it not? Why combine the two, beyond the obvious fact that the deployment of one makes the other accessible to a larger audience? There is no obvious public benefit. The brave new world of impact forced us to challenge that assumption head on. Over time, this has brought not only a benefit to wider society but also a fresh impetus to modern languages literary research that has challenged us to see our own connections with and value to wider society with fresh eyes. This finds us working in ways which earlier generations of researchers would have found hard to countenance. Our work has become increasingly visible and important, not just because we think it is but because, with our help, others are beginning to understand it better for what it can contribute. In a highly commodified world, like it or not, relevance comes from impact, not just from hard work and insight. To be recognised as important, modern languages literary research has had, more than ever, to prove its relevance. The trick is to achieve this without compromising the integrity of the fundamental research or selling our souls in an impact-driven Faustian pact.

One area which can benefit from modern languages research is that of public history, which The Historical Association defines as ‘bring[ing] together heritage, archives, museums, local history societies, history professionals, and active amateurs’ and ‘the engagement with history for different groups and professionals but with a level of expertise outside of the fixed university environment’.² This group of practitioners is central to the curation and interpretation of the sites that underpin the heritage tourism economy. Within this cultural ecosystem, Faye Sayer sees the public historians as enablers:

Critically, public history is not history becoming heritage, but is a merging of the two. As such, public history enables history to be valuable to a broad audience and to have significance in the present, beyond the creation of knowledge, providing broader social, political and economic value. Subsequently, a crucial part of a public historian’s role is in decoding history’s underlying significance to people outside the profession. To do this, many public historians and those working in sectors of public history, such as the media, listen to stories, and ensure, where possible, that the multiple voices are heard as part of the narrative of the past. This leads to new avenues for historical dialog through the understanding that ‘there is not a single unitary voice on the history of a site’. Public historians are not arbiters of the ‘past’, rather they are providers of present past narratives.³

Notably, there is no mention here, or indeed in most studies of public history, of a transnational, multilingual perspective. Yet, some of those ‘multiple voices’ and ‘present past narratives’ are embedded in the literature (broadly defined) and cultural material that sit at the heart of what we as modern languages researchers do when we interrogate literary texts in other languages and from other cultural perspectives. The past is reflected in prose, theatre and poetry, as well as travel writing, journalism and written ephemera. Of course, film and media, too, have their place. Yet, these foreign language sources can remain hidden, closed or inaccessible without the right expertise to mediate and interpret them – ‘decoding [their] underlying significance’ as Sayer would have it. Public historians and the fields they help to support, such as the heritage tourism industry, are, then, key potential beneficiaries of modern languages literary research.

The past is a foreign country

Imagine rummaging in the attic of the family home and coming across a suitcase full of letters and diaries in a foreign language where the only discernible words are the names of places and long-deceased relatives. What secrets might be contained in these forgotten documents? What might you learn about your own past if you were able to read them? This hypothetical scenario reflects, at a hyper-local level, the reality of our understanding of countless archives, libraries, collections and other ephemera held by all manner of cultural institutions across the UK. Be it letters, books, foreign periodicals, diaries or visitor books, there remains a wealth of information that is yet to see the light of day or be understood, even when its presence is known. The assumption that awareness of a resource signals understanding of its content is a dangerous one to make. As a frequent visitor to the British Library, I have lost count of the times a book, more often than not a foreign language title published in the nineteenth century, has arrived from the stacks uncut, simultaneously catalogued and present while inaccessible and absent. This begs the question, how much more is there to understand about our past, from even the most well-researched and not-so-distant periods? This is one area where modern languages literary research can make a real difference in opening up and interpreting previously hidden resources. What we uncover is a potential gold mine for the fields of public history and heritage tourism. In terms of practical, commodifiable value, literary research into foreign language sources can contribute new data, visual material, stories and ideas. It also brings a sense of connectedness, highlighting the value of the local to the global. Unheard narratives emerge through storytelling, and new and fascinating artefacts surface. This new material can, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett puts it, ‘raise the threshold of wonder’,⁴ unlocking sources, as well as foregrounding once-hidden witnesses to the changes to our world. The resource is there in plain sight, but it needs modern languages researchers to unlock the content.

My own experience of the value of literary research to public history and heritage tourism centres on the field of travel writing and my work on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project ‘European Travellers to Wales: 1750–2010’. This was a collaborative project, led by Bangor University along with Swansea University and the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, based in Aberystwyth, that ran from 2013 to 2018.⁵ We explored the representation of Wales and ‘Welshness’ in texts by European travellers from 1750 to the present day, homing in on key points in the period of Welsh modernisation from the Industrial Revolution to the post-devolution era. The idea was to challenge perceptions of Wales in European travel writing as ‘unknown’ and ‘invisible’ by uncovering, collating and interpreting accounts of travel to Wales in languages other than English. In so doing, we were able to challenge notions of hegemony and identity within the genre of travel writing, relating both to the places visited and the places of origin of the diverse travellers we encountered. Our research, including the co-authored book Hidden Texts, Hidden Nation. (Re)Discoveries of Wales in French and German Travel Writing (1750–2018), presented an important case study of a culture often minoritised in the field by providing a telling illustration of the dynamics of European intercultural relations and representation.⁶ The writers we identified ranged from more famous public figures, such as Madame de Genlis,⁷ Felix Mendelssohn⁸ and Hermann von Pückler-Muskau,⁹ to travelling scholars, industrial spies, exiles and professional travel writers. The range of accounts painted a picture of Wales over two and a half centuries and held a mirror up to the changing value systems and shifting social structures across Europe. Some played to the stereotypes: Genlis was enchanted by the harp, Mendelssohn hated the weather, Pückler-Muskau cavorted with champagne on the summit of Eryri, his hyperbole rendering the scene as an imaginative Friedrichesque feast of the sublime:

Aussichten entschädigten mich nicht, den von Wolken ganz umschleiert, konnte ich kaum 20 Schritt weit vor mir sehen, und in diesem geheimnißvollen clair obscur erreichte ich auch den ersehnten Gipfel, zu dem man über einen schmalen Felsenkamm gelangt. Ein Steinhaufen, in dessen Mitte eine hölzerne Säule steht, ist als Wahrzeichen aufgerichtet. Ich glaubte hier der Erscheinung meines Doppelgängers zu begegnen, als ein junger Mann aus dem Nebel hervortrat, der mir selbst völlig glich, NB. wie ich aussah, als ich vor 16 Jahren in den Schweizer-Alpen umherirrte.¹⁰

[I was not compensated for my sufferings by the view, for, shrouded as I was in clouds, I could hardly see twenty paces before me. In this mysterious clair obscur I reached the wished-for summit, the way to which lies over an irregular wall of rocks. A pile of stones, in the centre of which is a wooden pillar, marks the highest point. I thought I met my wraith, as a young man emerged from the mist who precisely resembled me, that is to say when I wandered over the Swiss Alps sixteen years ago.]¹¹

Others resisted the temptation to romanticise quite so much and instead saw a side to Wales that would have been entirely new to their contemporary readers. For example, Christian August Gottlieb Goede, writing in 1804, took aim at the English mismanagement of the principality, noting that ‘sich die Englische Regierung nicht gleichgültiger gegen die Cultivirung des Welschen Volkes hätte zeigen können, als es bis jetzt geschehen ist’ [the English government could not have been more disinterested in the cultivation of the Welsh people than it has been up to now],¹² while French industrialists, father and son Georges and Achille Dufaud, visiting in the 1820s, marvelled at the advanced technology and sublime grandeur of the Dowlais iron works at Merthyr Tydfil, highlighting the skilled workforce found there: ‘Le pays de Galles et Cyfarthfa surtout a et conserve les meilleurs puddleurs du monde, un puddleur ordinaire et non soigneux n’est pas admis’ [Wales and Cyfarthfa in particular has and retains the best puddlers in the world, an ordinary, careless puddler is not admitted].¹³

As this brief overview suggests, the range of material uncovered was incredibly varied and of potential value to diverse stakeholders. The multilingual aspect of the project brought an added and hugely significant dimension by opening up new perspectives and uncovering previously unheard voices. Beyond the co-authored volume mentioned above, we undertook a number of academic activities during the three years of the main project, including journal articles, blogs, a conference and two doctoral theses. As these elements developed, they provided the raw material for the impact activities that were central to the main project and formed the basis of the follow-on activities. These ranged from an exhibition and educational materials to tourist information and public history resources and involved a number of formal and informal partners across Wales, including Visit Wales, the National Library of Wales, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Wales, the Ceredigion Museum, Storiel (Bangor), the Swansea Museum, the People’s Collection Wales and individuals such as creative writers, artists and local historians. Despite the breadth of impact and engagement activities, it must be stressed that the project was first and foremost a study of literature. The underpinning research focused on the discovery, analysis and contextualisation of travel writing as a literary genre. The ideas around impact generation emerged once the methodological direction had been set and were driven by the primary material as it emerged. It is on this basis that I want to make the case for literary research: our exploration of the travellers’ voices has been at the root of this project that – ultimately – touched so many lives through impact and engagement activities; in other words, it was the ultimate enabler for this project.

From page to public

So how did we translate the ‘multiple voices’ and ‘present past narratives’ we uncovered into accessible public history and heritage tourism resources? This was an organic rather than a linear process. Faced at the outset with the set of questions outlined at the beginning of this chapter – What is it all for? Why should public money be given over to projects like this when there is so much else at stake? What is the point? – we had to think hard about the ways in which our collaborative research was going to matter beyond the academy. Some things were immediately clear. We had the huge advantage of working on a topic that would be of interest to the public locally and that fitted with the needs of various Welsh Government departments and cultural institutions, so an approach focused on public history feeding into heritage tourism made sense. An exhibition involving regional museums would work for local audiences given the large number of artists and other creatives among our group of travellers; the National Library of Wales would be an excellent partner given their educational remit; working with Visit Wales was obvious for a project largely focused on travellers and tourists; and the Royal Commission’s interest in the built environment made them a clear candidate for collaboration given the detailed descriptions of the changing face of Wales found in our corpus. But we still had to persuade these institutions to come on board and explain what was in it for them. This is quite hard to do when you are at the beginning of a project and not entirely sure what might emerge. Pilot events and persistence were crucial to the process of persuading third-sector organisations such as Visit Wales and the Ceredigion Museum to come on board at an early stage, not least as supportive partners in the grant application process. Other relationships were more serendipitous such as our work with the Royal Commission whose offices happened to be in the same building as the Aberystwyth-based colleagues on the project.

Underpinning our activities, and perhaps of most importance for public history in particular, was the development of the searchable database of travel accounts hosted on the project website.¹⁴ When we began work on our project, we expected, based on an initial scoping exercise, to find around 100 travel narratives dealing with Wales. To date, the number is just short of 500 with new texts still surfacing. In part this is due to the mislabelling of Wales as England in many book titles and catalogue entries, which rendered the nation hidden, as we note in our book, but perhaps the key development is the enhanced discoverability brought by more efficient search engines and the digitalisation of older material. We were able to build on this to showcase the stories and maximise their accessibility to a range of users. The database provides links to original texts where possible and also to translations where they exist. A mapped itinerary, information on the travel writer and a summary of each text are provided to enable users to gauge the value of a given text to their needs, thus providing a useful tool for local history groups, other researchers and students. Notably, the resource aided consultants in preparing the successful bid to recognise the Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales as a UNESCO World Heritage Site by helping them to draw out the international significance of the area through detailed information gleaned from texts by the likes of Johann Georg Kohl, visiting in 1844,¹⁵ and L. Smyers, who described Penrhyn Quarry near Bangor as ‘pas pareil dans le monde’ [unparalled in the world].¹⁶ The caveat for others aiming to replicate our approach is the issue of defining, or at least estimating, the extent of the corpus (which we failed to do!). By its very nature, the untapped potential of foreign language material in libraries and archives is predicated on the Rumsfeldian principle of unknown unknowns. You simply do not know how much there is until you look, and this can command a huge amount of research time.

Equally time-consuming is the curation of an exhibition. We worked with the Ceredigion Museum to curate ‘EurÔlwg/EuroVisions’, an exhibition of art and artefacts relating to the experiences of travellers to Wales with accompanying information drawing on the travel narratives we had uncovered. Exhibits ranged from paintings by well-known exiled twentieth-century artists such as Karel Lek, Josef Herman and Heinz Koppel to drawings by Felix Mendelssohn, foreign-language tourist brochures and posters, and even the outfit worn by the Breton onion sellers, once a familiar sight on the streets of South Wales. Following its run in Aberystwyth, the exhibition then travelled to Storiel in Bangor and the Swansea Museum and remains partly available through the project website.¹⁷ In terms of the benefit to public history, the exhibition enabled all three museums to enhance their outreach programmes through related events such as talks and school visits, as well as increasing footfall from the local community. The idea for the exhibition title, which also worked bilingually, was inspired by a well-known multilingual song contest, emphasising the transnational nature of the content, while the local aspect was enhanced by the gathering of visitor feedback on luggage labels. Although successful, the event was not a straightforward undertaking, especially in relation to the artworks. Permissions from multiple lenders, some of whom charged a fee, took time to arrange, as did the careful logistical planning involved in moving valuable exhibits from one location to another. Working with experienced curators was essential in this regard but the planning was complex and time consuming. The assumption that your project is top of the list is a dangerous one to make as partner institutions negotiate their own competing demands.

Over the first two years of the project, we became increasingly aware of the potential value of our work for the interpretation of the history of Wales, in terms of both the understanding of Welsh heritage and the impact that it might have on heritage tourism. This led to our successful Follow-On Funding application for the more simply titled ‘Travellers to Wales’ project. For this, we worked with the Royal Commission and Visit Wales to produce the ‘Journey to the Past’ website.¹⁸ The website, which is fully multilingual throughout (Welsh, English, French and German) combines fifty-four travel destinations, with over seventy heritage sites across Wales arranged into nine themed trails. As well as showcasing a range of materials from the Royal Commission’s extensive archives, the page for each location includes translations of excerpts from French and German travel texts translated into both Welsh and English, making them accessible to new audiences for the first time. For example, the entry for Capel Curig in Gwynedd showcases narratives by Goede, Samuel Heinrich Spiker, Jules Gourdault and J. Menard, all of whom would be new to the majority of tourists today but whose commentary relates to their own experiences. For example, Spiker describes the view visible from above the Capel Curig Inn, built by Lord Penrhyn in 1801, in terms which underline the sublime grandeur of the landscape for which North Wales remains so famous:

Die Aussicht auf die umliegende Gegend, und namentlich nach Westen zu, zu genießen, muß man vor das Haus gehen und eine gegenüberliegende Anhöhe ersteigen. Hier entfaltet sich ganz die wilde Schönheit der Gegend: überall nichts als Klippen und Schluchten: gegen Westen die beiden kleinen Seen, welche am Fuße des Snowdon, nicht weit von einander, liegen, und über ihnen der dunkele Snowdon selbst, mit seinen zwei dicht neben einander emporstarrenden Spitzen!

[In order to enjoy the prospect of the surrounding country, and especially to the west, we must ascend an eminence in front of the house. Here the country spreads itself out before us in all its wild beauty; in every direction we see nothing but rocks and ravines. To the west we perceive two little lakes at the foot of Snowdon, not far from each other; and above them the dark Snowdon itself, with its two closely approximating points.]¹⁹

As well as enabling us to surface to a broader public the materials we had discovered and interpreted, our partner organisations also benefitted from involvement in the project. Visit Wales embedded the website into their own, having committed to the project as partners based on the value of the research to their promotion of Wales, in particular in relation to their key German market.²⁰ The Royal Commission was able to further develop and disseminate its holdings to audiences beyond Wales, in particular through the creation of new digital artefacts such as the animated film about the Cyfarthfa Ironworks at Merthyr Tydfil that featured excerpts from the vivid narratives of Carl Gustav Carus, Carl Klocke, Louis Simenon and Alphonse Esquiros, who was much affected by the experience:

J’étais couché depuis quelques heures déjà lorsque je me sentis réveillé en sursaut par un éclat d’incendie. Je courus à ma fenêtre, vis le ciel rouge comme s’il eût été enflammé par une aurore boréale. J’étais sur le point de crier: au feu! Mais comme personne ne bougeait dans l’hôtel et que tout était tranquille dans le voisinage, je me rassurai, et bientôt je me souvins que je vivais cette nuit-là dans le pays des foreges. La lueur sanglante qui empourprait les ténèbres était en effet une réverbération des ironworks.

[I had already been in bed a few hours when a flash of fire woke me with a start. I ran to my window, saw the sky all red as though ablaze by an aurora borealis. I was about to cry out: fire! But as nobody was moving in the [Castle] hotel and that all seemed calm nearby, I reassured myself and remembered that I was living in the land of forges that night. The blood-coloured light that reddened the darkness was in fact a reflection of the ironworks.]²¹

Again, success was down to securing the right partners. Working with a well-known and respected body such as the Royal Commission gave us access to a range of material and contacts which we would never have been able to garner ourselves, while Visit Wales enabled us to access audiences beyond Wales through its various channels. Dealing with such high-profile partners is, however, not always straightforward. While the Royal Commission, based in the same building as two of the project team, was always on hand and accessible, working with Visit Wales was made more complicated by frequent changes in personnel, as is often the case with government departments. The will to collaborate was always there but the case had to be made more than once before commitment was secured. Nonetheless, the impact generated by the project was notable. The economic benefit is hard to quantify but it is clear that there was a long-term contribution to the economy of North Wales in particular through the successful UNESCO bid and to the Welsh economy more broadly as a result of our work with Visit Wales, all the more so given the need to attract European tourists back to Wales following the pandemic.

A plea for us

The crucial role of modern languages literary research in uncovering lost stories lies at the heart of the success of this project. The material and our interpretation of it enabled a deeper understanding and provided extra layers of knowledge. This can be seen as part of a process of democratisation, adding additional, previously unheard or long-forgotten voices to the narrative of Wales. Reflecting the fragmentary nature of heritage, this newly (re)discovered material constitutes another element of the value matrix through which we understand the heritage of Wales and its place in the world. This metonymic process was not only able to surface commodifiable, practical new resources for the fields of public history and heritage tourism but, significantly, also fostered new areas of cultural connectivity that enhanced individual and societal wellbeing by reinforcing a sense of belonging and revalidation of already known cultural value from a new perspective. Yet, despite offering such value, research in the field of heritage tourism seems to focus on language as a means to communicate with visitors, not as a factor in the curation of sites. There is a notable absence as the implications of linguistic diversity and translation remain largely unconsidered. Underlining this, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett lists a plethora of ‘instruments’ available to heritage industry in interpreting sites:

Dance teams, heritage performers, craft cooperatives, cultural centers, arts festivals, museums, exhibitions, recordings, archives, indigenous media, and cultural curricula are not only evidence of heritage, its continuity, and its vitality to the present, they are also instruments for adding value to the cultural forms they perform, teach, exhibit, circulate, and market. Much is made of the traditions themselves, as if the instruments for presenting them were invisible or inconsequential.²²

Although the transnational, transcultural aspect of the heritage industry is implicit here, not least through the mention of ‘indigenous media’, the role of linguistic and cultural-specific knowledge in producing material and curation is largely, if not entirely, unacknowledged. Modern languages research and its value to heritage tourism is, it seems, entirely ‘invisible or inconsequential’. There is a worry also that the potential perspectives such research might offer are neglected on purpose. Discussing the approach to presenting heritage sites as multi-sensory experiences, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett suggests that ‘[the] expressed desire to make sites real and vivid indicates that sites cannot do this for themselves. The inability of sites to tell their own story authorizes the interpretation project itself.’²³ This shifts the power dynamic markedly when considering the inclusion of or interest in foreign-language resources in the presentation of a site. There is an implicit ethical choice to be made in bringing in a new set of voices.

Things have moved on. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett was writing in the late 1990s but generally, heritage tourism research continues to discuss globality, identity, the past with no or little reference to linguistic diversity. The existence of translation and transcultural understanding is generally taken for granted. This has prompted a recent turn in the field of translation studies that seeks to question this approach.²⁴ Viewing places and artefacts through the prism of modern languages research can lead to a process of transvaluation, a change in the type of value assigned to an object, and recent research on public history suggests a shift that modern languages researchers will no doubt welcome. Discussing ‘emerging trends in public history’, Sayer notes that:

[l]ocalized and socially engaged approaches are needed for projects to have positive and transformative impacts on the public. This enables localized micro approaches to public history theory and practice to be situated within a wider global framework of public history, supporting critical dialog and collaborative reflection as well as challenging English-speaking perceptions that dominate master public history narratives.²⁵

This sounds promising. We, as researchers, have the means to help achieve these aims but to do so, those working in the fields of public history and heritage tourism need a better understanding of the ways in which modern languages research can enable but also be enabled to challenge and confront accepted views and suggest new systems, taxonomies and perspectives. By showing how the study of literature and other aspects of our research can have impact and are, therefore, highly relevant, we can forge important and productive partnerships. In these strange times, and perhaps particularly so, the work we do as modern language researchers has a crucial role to play in connecting cultures. There is no better argument for literature than that.

Notes

1.   Rick Rylance, Literature and the Public Good (Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 14.

2.   https://www.history.org.uk/historian/categories/public-history [accessed 27 April 2026].

3.   Faye Sayer, Public History: A Practical Guide (Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 5.

4.   Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (University of California Press, 1998), p. 72.

5.   My colleagues on the project were co-investigators Kathryn N. Jones (Swansea) and Heather Williams (CAWCS), Research Assistant Rita Singer, and PhD students Christina Les (Bangor) and Anna-Lou Dijsktra (Swansea). We were fortunate to receive two tranches of Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding over that period in the form of a Research Grant and then Follow-On Funding for Impact.

6.   Kathryn N. Jones, Carol Tully and Heather Williams, Hidden Texts, Hidden Nation: (Re)Discoveries of Wales in French and German Travel Writing (1750–2018) (Liverpool University Press, 2020).

7.   Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest de Saint-Aubin, Comtesse de Genlis, Mémoires inédits de Madame la Comtesse de Genlis, sur le dix-huitième siècle et la révolution française, depuis 1756 jusqu’à nos jours, 8 vols (Ladvocat, 1825).

8.   Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Briefe, ed. by Rudolf Elvers (Fischer, 1984).

9.   Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, Briefe eines Verstorbenen: Ein fragmentarisches Tagebuch aus England, Wales, Irland und Frankreich; geschrieben in den Jahren 1828 und 1829 (Hallberger, 1836).

10.   Pückler-Muskau, Briefe eines Verstorbenen, p. 69.

11.   Translation taken from Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, A Tour in England, Ireland and France in the Years 1828 and 1829 with Remarks on the Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants, and Anecdotes of Distinguished Public Characters in a Series of Letters by a German Prince (Carey and Lea, 1833), p. 295. Note the omission of Wales from the title in translation.

12.   Christian August Gottlieb Goede, England, Wales, Irland und Schottland: Erinnerungen an Natur und Kunst aus einer Reise in den Jahren 1802 und 1803, 5 vols (Arnoldische Buch- und Kunsthandlung, 1804–5), V, pp. 360–1.

13.   See Guy Thuillier, Georges Dufaud et les débuts du grand capitalisme dans la métallurgie, en Nivernais, au XIXe siècle (SEVPEN, 1959), p. 225.

14.   See: http://etw.bangor.ac.uk/accounts [accessed 27 April 2026].

15.   Johann Georg Kohl, Reisen in England und Wales (Arnold, 1844).

16.   L. Smyers, Essai sur l’état actuel de l’industrie ardoisière en France et en Angleterre, suivi de quelques observations pratiques sur la formation du schiste ardoisier (Poulet-Malassis, 1858), p. 8.

17.   http://eurovisions.bangor.ac.uk/index.php.en [accessed 27 April 2026].

18.   https://footsteps.bangor.ac.uk/en/ [accessed 27 April 2026].

19.   https://footsteps.bangor.ac.uk/en/location/capel-curig [accessed 27 April 2026].

20.   https://www.visitwales.com/de/info/Streifz%C3%BCge-durch-vergangene-Zeiten [accessed 27 April 2026].

21.   https://footsteps.bangor.ac.uk/en/location/merthyr-tydfil [accessed 27 April 2026].

22.   Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, p. 156.

23.   Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, p. 168.

24.   See Sharon Deane-Cox and Pauline Côme, ‘Heritage Interpretation(s): Remembering, Translating, and Utilizing the Past’ in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Memory, ed. by Sharon Deane-Cox and Anneleen Spiessens (Routledge, 2022), pp. 186–209.

25.   Faye Sayer, ‘Open Dialogues and Localized Approaches: Reflections on International Public History Perspectives and Practices’, International Public History, 5 (2022), pp. 53–5 (p. 53).

References