Tom Furniss is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Strathclyde. He has published widely on literature, philosophy, travel writing and geology of the eighteenth century and Romantic periods. He is the author of Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (CUP, 1993).

Focusing on eighteenth and early nineteenth-century travellers in Scotland, Tom Furniss finds new and striking things to say about the literary inflections of pre-scientific geological writing. Combining extensive research with personal experience of the Highlands, for anyone wishing to explore Scottish intersections of geology, literature, and aesthetics this is the go-to book.

• 1. Introduction; 2. Natural History, Travel, and Early Explorations of Scotland’s Natural History; 3. John Walker’s ‘Report on the Hebrides’ (1764-1771); 4. A Country Torn and Convulsed: Pioneering Geological Observations in Thomas Pennant’s Tours of Scotland (1769, 1772); 5. Astonishing Productions of Volcanic Combustion: Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond’s Travels in England, Scotland, and the Hebrides (1784, 1799); 6. James Hutton’s Geological Tours of Scotland (1764-1788); 7. Natural History Among the Mountains of a Wild Country: Robert Jameson on Arran, 1797 and 1799; 8. The End of Romantic Geology in Scotland? John MacCulloch’s A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (1819); References; Index.

Tom Furniss is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Strathclyde. He has published widely on literature, philosophy, travel writing and geology of the eighteenth century and Romantic periods. He is the author of Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (CUP, 1993).

Focusing on eighteenth and early nineteenth-century travellers in Scotland, Tom Furniss finds new and striking things to say about the literary inflections of pre-scientific geological writing. Combining extensive research with personal experience of the Highlands, for anyone wishing to explore Scottish intersections of geology, literature, and aesthetics this is the go-to book.

• 1. Introduction; 2. Natural History, Travel, and Early Explorations of Scotland’s Natural History; 3. John Walker’s ‘Report on the Hebrides’ (1764-1771); 4. A Country Torn and Convulsed: Pioneering Geological Observations in Thomas Pennant’s Tours of Scotland (1769, 1772); 5. Astonishing Productions of Volcanic Combustion: Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond’s Travels in England, Scotland, and the Hebrides (1784, 1799); 6. James Hutton’s Geological Tours of Scotland (1764-1788); 7. Natural History Among the Mountains of a Wild Country: Robert Jameson on Arran, 1797 and 1799; 8. The End of Romantic Geology in Scotland? John MacCulloch’s A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (1819); References; Index.