| This dissertation explores a range of nationalist discourses of Scottish culture---literature, film, folklore studies, social clubs and political organizations---that have emerged in this century. Drawing from postcolonial theory and feminist theories of affect, the analysis argues for reading representations of nation as a domesticated "home," an image of limited physical space of sovereignty which also carries with it feelings of safety, comfort and familiarity. It examines how recurring ambivalent assumptions about the Scottish home---such as its dual reputation as a preserved ancient land of Europe and a modern industrial center---have been imagined as organically connected to the landscape and its people. Such contradictions have been repeatedly resolved through depictions of the Scottish "folk," which have naturalized, and at times have challenged, existing divisions of gender, class and culture. The dissertation begins with an investigation of the late nineteenth-century "Kailyard School" of popular fiction and its vast American, Canadian and English readership. The idyllic portraits of preindustrial Highland society in these texts use sentimentality to create an image of original national order which appealed to contemporary international middle-class desires for political stability, economic liberty, obedient women, and disciplined workers. The study then turns to the politicized modernist poetry and prose of the Scottish Renaissance (1920--50). Rather than extolling the nationalism of this canonized literary movement, as has so often been done, this dissertation illustrates its tendencies toward an almost exclusively male cultural front. Its aggressive attack on Kailyard sentimentality offered an aesthetic of masculinist seriousness that, while proposing to unify and "de-feminize" Scottish culture against a softened and assimilated British identity, also constructed a narrowly gendered vision of Scotland still often invoked today. The dissertation concludes by focusing on a variety of cultural formations, including clan societies, Burns Clubs, heritage organizations based in Canada, the United States, and Australia, as well as examples of tourist literature and political party pamphlets in Scotland. Recent Hollywood and British cinematic versions of Scottish cultural history---Braveheart, Rob Roy and Trainspotting---are also shown to be instrumental to the ways the contemporary Scottish nation and its identity have been imagined. |
