Inside and outside the nation: Highland identity in nineteenth-century Britain

My dissertation investigates the condition of Scottish Highland identity in nineteenth-century British culture and suggests a rethinking of British national identity formation in the nation's imperial century. Highland identity was constructed as that of a strange yet alluring people altogether outside the nation who nevertheless came to represent the very essence of the nation. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the Scottish Highlands, largely ignored before then, became the subject of intense scrutiny and fascination for metropolitan Britons in Edinburgh and London. Highlanders were thought to be Britain's own home-grown Noble Savages, and their distinct romanticized culture figured prominently in many different cultural representations. Like the "wild" Indians of North America, to whom they often were compared, Highlanders were an exotic race of people whose primitive society placed them beyond civilized British society. The very alterity of the Highlander, however, was brought into the service of articulating British national identity in several important ways. The Highlands were introduced into British consciousness by Scottish cultural authorities in Edinburgh to voice Scotland's own distinctive identity within the framework of British union. Highland "tribal" customs and traditions, manner of dress, literature, music, and landscape all continued to register as strange and exotic while remaining uniquely "British.".;I explore the making of this contradictory identity through an investigation of its representations in a wide variety of genres, including literature, historiography, military accounts, economic treatises, committee reports, letters, narrative painting, pageant plans, travelogues, and published and private diaries. My discussion also devotes a large part of its analysis to Walter Scott, simply because Scott was by far the single most influential purveyor of Highland representation in the early nineteenth century. Although his literary predecessors included James Macpherson--whose Ossianic poems popularized the Highlands in the eighteenth century--Scott's more historicized vision of the Highlands eventually predominated in British culture. It was through Scott's literary vision that so much of the literate British public came to understand the Highlands.