10 research outputs found
Scottish Literature, Periodization, and the Liberal Arts Curriculum
Describes opportunities and approaches for teaching Scottish literature, chiefly of the 18th-20th centuries, in the undergraduate liberal arts curriculum and discusses how these relate to debates over periodization
Gendered nation : Anglo-Scottish relations in British letters 1707-1830
My dissertation argues that national tropes are continually in a state of flux as
they are employed to respond to historical, socio-political and cultural events and trends,
and demonstrates that their state at a specific moment encapsulates struggles between
various concepts of national identity. I trace shifts in the configuration of Anglo-Scottish
relations by undertaking a microanalysis of two specific recurring tropological categories
- familial and homosocial tropes — in a number of key moments in cross-border relations
between 1707 and 1830.
The first chapter, directed at the years surrounding the Union of Parliaments,
traces the suppression of cross-border dissonance in homosocial egalitarian tropes which
define Anglo-Scottish relations in the work of pro-union pamphleteers, and contrasts this
strategy of containment with the disruptive presence of familial tropes in the pamphlets
of anti-union writers. The second chapter traces the reappearance of this conflict in the
decade following Culloden. Roderick Random, written from the margins by Tobias
Smollett, reveals a discomfort with unifying tropes, although it ends with a cursory
gesture towards a national marital union. James Ramble, in contrast, written by the
English Edward Kimber, deflects dissonance onto Jacobitism, suggesting through tropes
of friendship that all aspects of Anglo-Scottish relations are seamlessly integrated into
British unity.
Chapters three and four foreground the 1760s, a decade in which Scottish agency,
in the person of Lord Bute, the Lord Treasurer, seems to reach new heights. Yet it is also
a decade of rampant Scotophobia, incited by the Wilkites to undermine Bute's authority.
Tropological warfare is an important element of this rhetorical conflict. In chapters five
and six, I uncover two competing concepts of Britishness, primarily created by English
and Irish writers, which emerge in the 1790s. The first engages with homosocial tropes to
foreground Scottish agency in nation-building and empire-building projects, but does so
at the expense of a distinct Scottish culture. The second, also produced by English and
Irish writers, reifies and celebrates Scottish culture through tropes of cross-border
courtship, but tends to represent the emergent concept as endangered, lacking national
agency. Chapter six analyzes the Scottish response to this tropological binary.Arts, Faculty ofEnglish, Department ofGraduat
James Hogg and the literary marketplace : Scottish Romanticism and the working-class author /
Includes bibliographical references (p. [235]-253) and index