Files
Abstract
This dissertation traces the impact of nineteenth-century women writers on literary conceptions of the Scottish Highlands. Analyzing the works of writers such as Christian Isobel Johnstone, Queen Victoria, Margaret Oliphant, and Fiona Macleod, the dissertation argues that while the Scottish literary tradition ostensibly began with and was first popularized by male writers (Walter Scott and Robert Burns, to name two), the tradition was maintained and developed by women writers, many of whom received little credit for their work in their own day. For these writers, domesticity as represented within the clan structure of the Highlands was a point of reference that allowed them to speak from a position of authority even when their works were explicitly political in nature—as they inevitably were. The writers discussed here wrestled with the place of Scotland, and the Highlands more specifically, in the British Empire, often mobilizing fictional narratives to launch stirring critiques of militarism and imperial violence. Most importantly, the writers featured in this dissertation made popular a conceptualization of the Highlands that was explicitly gendered in nature by reconstructing the region as a uniquely feminine space despite and even alongside of popular association of the Highlands with the hyper-masculinity of the Highland regiments and the martial romances of Scott. By the end of the century, the “imagined Highlands” these women created were so ubiquitous that their feminized characteristics were regarded as markers of authenticity by the reading public and by some critics. So popular was the Scotland they had created that their legacy lives on today—in affinity Scots, in video games, and in bodice-ripper romance novels.