Sir Walter Scott's The Antiquary and the Ossian controversy

A study of the influence of the controversy about Macpherson's Ossian poems on Scott's novel The Antiquary

Fingalian topographies: Ossian and the Highland Tour 1760-1805

If Ossian validated the Highland landscape for eighteenth-century tourists, the landscape, in turn, seemed to authenticate poems whose authenticity never ceased to be doubted; but text and topography alike ran the risk of dissolving into insubstantiality. Many tourists cited ‘local tradition’ in order to embroider existing (or to invent new) Fingalian place-names. Ranging over a wide variety of eighteenth-century travel-writers, this article casts new light on the relations between Ossian, travel-writing and Highland topography. It concludes by discussing the ‘fieldwork’ tradition of Ossianic tourism after 1800, which sought out local tradition bearers, rather than attempting to authenticate Macpherson's ‘translations’

Marilyn Speers Butler 1937–2014

No abstract available

Scott’s Reparative Land Ethic

A review essay discussing Susan Oliver\u27s important and convincing book Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland: Emergent Ecologies of a Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2021), noting Scott\u27s land ethic and active role in managing his estate at Abbotsford and in afforestation, and suggesting that Oliver\u27s book presents a cumulative literary history of Scotland’s ecologies, so that Scott\u27s poetry and novels assume a new relevance for 21st century readers

Philosophical Vagabonds: Pedestrianism, Politics, and Improvement on the Scottish Tour

Discusses John Bristed\u27s facetious, digressive memoir, Anthroplanomenos (1803), about a walking tour through the Highlands of lScotland in 1801 by two young students disguised as American sailors, with little money and no identity papers,” describing their adventures and misadventures as they encountered suspicion, hostility and sometimes surprising kindness; brings out the two travellers’ often-self-contradictory responses to what they saw and experienced; and shows how the tour contributed to their changing political perspective, mirroring the turn away from 1790s radicalism in better-known writers in the same years. An edited version of the 2017 Marilyn Butler Lecture, for the British Association for Romantic Studies

Philosophical vagabonds: Pedestrianism, politics and improvement on the Scottish tour

Discusses John Bristed's "facetious, digressive" memoir, Anthroplanomenos (1803), about a walking tour through the Highlands of lScotland in 1801 by two young students "disguised as American sailors, with little money and no identity papers,” describing their adventures and misadventures as they encountered suspicion, hostility and sometimes surprising kindness; brings out the two travellers’ often-self-contradictory responses to what they saw and experienced; and shows how the tour contributed to their changing political perspective, mirroring the turn away from 1790s radicalism in better-known writers in the same years. An edited version of the 2017 Marilyn Butler Lecture, for the British Association for Romantic Studies

Radical Orientalism: Rights, Reform, and Romanticism. By Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

No abstract available

Traveling Gaels:Coloniality and dislocation in the Gaelic Atlantic

Our essay studies three early-nineteenth century autobiographical texts written by young Scottish Gaels who narrate their sense of dislocation in the 'Gaelic' Atlantic. Dugald MacNicol's journal (1809–1813), written entirely in Gaelic, describes leaving Argyll for Barbados as a young army officer. Memoirs of Charles Campbell (1828) was written in a Glasgow prison, after Campbell had murdered his wife in a fit of insanity, following his service on a Jamaican slave plantation. William MacGillivray's English-language Hebridean journal (1817–1818), describes the author's sojourn, while a student, on the island of Harris. We examine these journals in the context of Romantic-era travel literature and conclude with thoughts on the relationship between an increasingly stressed Gaelic culture at home and the emergence of a 'Gaelic' Atlantic within the British imperial world