Stepping Westward


Book Description

Stepping Westward is the first book dedicated to the literature of the Scottish Highland tour of 1720-1830, a major cultural phenomenon that attracted writers and artists like Pennant, Johnson and Boswell, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Hogg, Keats, Daniell, and Turner, as well as numerous less celebrated travellers and tourists. Addressing more than a century's worth of literary and visual representations of the Highlands, the book casts new light on how the tour developed a modern literature of place, acting as a catalyst for thinking about improvement, landscape, and the shaping of British, Scottish, and Gaelic identities. It pays attention to the relationship between travellers and the native Gaels, whose world was plunged into crisis by rapid and forced social change. At the book's core lie the best-selling tours of Pennant and Dr Johnson, associated with attempts to 'improve' the intractable Gaidhealtachd in the wake of Culloden. Alongside the Ossian craze and Gilpin's picturesque, their books stimulated a wave of 'home tours' from the 1770s through the romantic period, including writing by women like Sarah Murray and Dorothy Wordsworth. The incidence of published Highland Tours (many lavishly illustrated), peaked around 1800, but as the genre reached exhaustion, the 'romantic Highlands' were reinvented in Scott's poems and novels, coinciding with steam boats and mass tourism, but also rack-renting, sheep clearance, and emigration.




Gaelic Scotland


Book Description

This book, originally published in 1988, examines the Highlands and Islands of Scotland over several centuries and charts their cultural transformation from a separate region into one where the processes of anglicisation have largely succeeded. It analyses the many aspects of change including the policies of successive governments, the decline of the Gaelic language, the depressing of much of the population into peasantry and the clearances.




Scottish Fairy Belief


Book Description

The authorities told folk what they ought to believe, but what did they really believe? Throughout Scottish history, people have believed in fairies. They were a part of everyday life, as real as the sunrise, and as incontrovertible as the existence of God. While fairy belief was only a fragment of a much larger complex, the implications of studying this belief tradition are potentially vast, revealing some understanding of the worldview of the people of past centuries. This book, the first modern study of the subject, examines the history and nature of fairy belief, the major themes and motifs, the demonising attack upon the tradition, and the attempted reinstatement of the reality of fairies at the end of the seventeenth century, as well as their place in ballads and in Scottish literature.




The Scottish Historical Review


Book Description

A new series of the Scottish antiquary established 1886.




The Scottish Historical Review


Book Description

A new series of the Scottish antiquary established 1886.




Gaelic in Scotland 1698-1981


Book Description

Surprisingly little is known of the geographical history of Gaelic: where and when it was spoken in the past, and how and why the Gaelic-speaking area of Scotland – the Gaidhealtachd – has retreated and the language declined. A hundred years ago there were 250,000 Gaelic speakers. Now there are 80,000. This book answers four broad questions: What has been the geography of Gaelic in the past? How has that geography changed over time and space? What have been the patterns of language use within the Gaedhealtachd in the past? And what have been the processes of language change? Emphasis is upon the changing geography of the spoken language from 1698 to 1981: from the earliest date for which it is possible to document the expanse of the Gaelic language area to the most recent census to record the numbers speaking Gaelic.




Bibliotheca Scotia


Book Description




National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750–1914


Book Description

In a work of unusual ambition and rigorous comparison, Roberto Romani considers the concept of 'national character' in the intellectual histories of Britain and France. Perceptions of collective mentalities influenced a variety of political and economic debates, ranging from anti-absolutist polemic in eighteenth-century France to appraisals of socialism in Edwardian Britain. Romani argues that the eighteenth-century notion of 'national character', with its stress on climate and government, evolved into a concern with the virtues of 'public spirit' irrespective of national traits, in parallel with the establishment of representative institutions on the Continent. His discussion of contemporary thinkers includes Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Millar, Burke, Constant, de Staël and Tocqueville. After the mid-nineteenth century, the advent of social scientific approaches, including those of Spencer, Hobson and Durkheim, shifted the focus from the qualities required by political liberty to those needed to operate complex social systems, and to bear its psychological pressures.