"Through examination of various attitudes in the press, the author also presents the major issues debated in the newspapers relating to the Highlands, with some fascinating results: for example, land had already become a bone of contention, thirty years before the 1880s land reform movement." "Working within the previously unexplored field of newspaper materials in the mid-nineteenth century, Krisztina Fenyo shows the uniqueness, power and richness of these sources for the evaluation of the range of Scottish public opinion."--BOOK JACKET.
Can Scotland be considered an English colony? Is its experience and literature comparable to that of overseas postcolonial countries? Or are such comparisons no more than patriotic victimology to mask Scottish complicity in the British Empire and justify nationalism? These questions have been heatedly debated in recent years, especially in the run-up to the 2014 referendum on independence, and remain topical amid continuing campaigns for more autonomy and calls for a post-Brexit “indyref2.” Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination offers a general introduction to the emerging field of postcolonial Scottish studies, assessing both its potential and limitations in order to promote further interdisciplinary dialogue. Accessible to readers from various backgrounds, the book combines overviews of theoretical, social, and cultural contexts with detailed case studies of literary and nonliterary texts. The main focus is on internal divisions between the anglophone Lowlands and traditionally Gaelic Highlands, which also play a crucial role in Scottish–English relations. Silke Stroh shows how the image of Scotland’s Gaelic margins changed under the influence of two simultaneous developments: the emergence of the modern nation-state and the rise of overseas colonialism.
This book looks at visual images as an alternative and undervalued source of evidence for ideas about the Scottish Gaidhealtachd in the period 1700 - 1880. Illustrated with 100 plates, it brings together many little known and previously unrelated images. Addressing the textual bias inherent in Scottish historical studies, the book examines a broad range of maps, plans, paintings, drawings, sketches and printed images, arguing that the concept of antiquity was the single most powerful influence driving the visual representation of the Highlands and Islands from 1700 to 1880, and indeed beyond. Successive chapters look at archaeological, ethnological and geological motives for visualising the Highlands, and at the bias in favour of antiquity which resulted from the spread of these intellectual influences into the fine arts. The book concludes that the shadow of time which hallmarked visual representations of the region resulted in a preservationist mentality which has had powerful repercussions for approaches to Highland issues down to the present day. The book will appeal to historians, art historians, cultural geographers, and the general reader interested in Highland history and culture.
Nature and Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective presents 20 essays which explore diverse cultural interpretations of the earth's surface. Contrasted with each other and with the potentially cosmopolitan culture of science, these detailed studies of ways in which different cultures conceptualise nature appear in the context of global environmental change. Understanding across cultural lines has never been more important. This book shows how individual cultures see their own histories as offering protection for nature, while often viewing others as lacking such ethical restraints. Through such writing a discourse of understanding and common action becomes possible. The authors come from the places they discuss, and offer passionate as well as scholarly visions of nature within their cultural homes. Audience: This volume is of interest to academics and professionals working in the fields of cultural geography, environmental history, environmental studies, history of environmental ideas, environmental education, landscape and literature, nature and culture. It can be used for courses in the above-mentioned areas and seminars in comparative literature. It can also be used as a complimentary text to provide cultural context to literary readings, and for seminars on cultural aspects of the environment.
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, legions of English citizens headed north. Why and how did Scotland, once avoided by travelers, become a popular site for English tourists? In Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 1770-1914, Katherine Haldane Grenier uses published and unpublished travel accounts, guidebooks, and the popular press to examine the evolution of the idea of Scotland. Though her primary subject is the cultural significance of Scotland for English tourists, in demonstrating how this region came to occupy a central role in the Victorian imagination, Grenier also sheds light on middle-class popular culture, including anxieties over industrialization, urbanization, and political change; attitudes towards nature; nostalgia for the past; and racial and gender constructions of the "other." Late eighteenth-century visitors to Scotland may have lauded the momentum of modernization in Scotland, but as the pace of economic, social, and political transformations intensified in England during the nineteenth century, English tourists came to imagine their northern neighbor as a place immune to change. Grenier analyzes the rhetoric of tourism that allowed visitors to adopt a false view of Scotland as untouched by the several transformations of the nineteenth century, making journeys there antidotes to the uneasiness of modern life. While this view was pervasive in Victorian society and culture, and deeply marked the modern Scottish national identity, Grenier demonstrates that it was not hegemonic. Rather, the variety of ways that Scotland and the Scots spoke for themselves often challenged tourists' expectations.
This book explores the phenomenon of second sight in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Second sight is a form of prophetic vision associated with the folklore of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Described in Gaelic as the An-da-shealladh or ‘the two sights’, those in possession of this extraordinary power are said to foresee future events like the death of neighbour, the arrival of strangers into the community, the success or failure of a fishing trip. From the late seventeenth century onwards, rumours of this strange faculty attracted the attention of numerous scientists, travel writers, antiquarians, poets and artists. Focusing on the nineteenth century, this book examines second sight in relation to mesmerism and phrenology, modern spiritualism and anthropology, romance literature and folklorism and finally, psychical research and Celtic mysticism. Tracing the migration of a supposedly ‘Scottish’ tradition through various sites of nineteenth-century popular culture, it explores questions of nationhood and identity alongside those posed by supernatural phenomena.
In Echoes of Success, Ian Stuart Kelly uses new information about late Victorian Scottish Highland battalions to provide new insights into how groups identify themselves, and pass that sense on to successive generations of soldiers. Kelly applies concepts from organisational theory (the study of how organisations function) to demonstrate how soldiers’ experiences create a ‘blueprint’ of expected behaviours and thought patterns that contribute to their battalion’s continued success. This model manages the interplay between public perception and actual life experiences more effectively than current approaches to understanding identity. Also, Kelly’s primary research offers a more certain description of soldiers’ life, faith, education, and discipline than has previously been available.
The author of On the Other Side of Sorrow gives a detailed account of the causes and effects of the Scottish potato famine that began in 1846. When Scotland’s 1846 potato crop was wiped out by blight, the country was plunged into crisis. In the Hebrides and the West Highlands, a huge relief effort came too late to prevent starvation and death. Farther east, meanwhile, towns and villages from Aberdeen to Wick and Thurso protested the cost of the oatmeal that replaced potatoes as the people’s basic foodstuff. Oatmeal’s soaring price was blamed on the export of grain by farmers and landlords cashing in on even higher prices elsewhere. As a bitter winter gripped and families feared a repeat of the calamitous famine then ravaging Ireland, grain carts were seized, ships boarded, harbors blockaded, a jail forced open, and the military confronted. The army fired on one set of rioters. Savage sentences were imposed on others. But crowds of thousands also gained key concessions. Above all they won cheaper food. Those dramatic events have long been ignored or forgotten. Now, in James Hunter, they have their historian. The story he tells is, by turns, moving, anger-making, and inspiring. In an era of food banks and growing poverty, it is also very timely. Praise for Insurrection “Hunter never forgets that history is first of all narrative—and this book is rich in stories—or that is subject is the experience of individual men and women, creatures of flesh and blood, not abstractions. Insurrection is fascinating reading, both painful and uplifting.” —Allan Massie, the Scotsman (UK)
A comparative approach to the American Indians and Scottish Highlanders, this book examines the experiences of clans and tribal societies, which underwent parallel experiences on the peripheries of Britain's empire in Britain, the United States, and Canada.
There has been much academic interest in the role of museums as places where understanding of the past is shaped and legitimised for a wide and increasingly diverse public. This book focuses on the museum representations of the Highland Clearances - a much neglected aspect of one of the most disputed and politically-charged issues in modern Scottish history. Drawing together a range of inter-disciplinary themes and notions, it considers the cultural legacy of the period, brings to light the socially and historically conditioned meanings and values encapsulated in museum narratives of the Clearances, and shows the significance of collective memory in the negotiations inherent in heritage work. Examining both national and local museums in Scotland and concluding with comparisons with Australian museums of migration, Dynamics of Heritage contributes to our understanding of the processes of heritage construction, and its relationship to issues of memory and other modes of engagement with the past.
