The allure of the improbable: Evidence and romance in the Scottish Highlands, 1746–1790
I examine the British romanticization of the Scottish Highlands in light of important shifts in theories and practices of legal evidence for the purpose of plotting the formation of a modern cultural space of literature. The crux of my argument is that an enlightened cultural logic of probability th...
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| Format: | Dissertation |
| Language: | English |
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ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
01-01-2000
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | I examine the British romanticization of the Scottish Highlands in light of important shifts in theories and practices of legal evidence for the purpose of plotting the formation of a modern cultural space of literature. The crux of my argument is that an enlightened cultural logic of probability that pervaded legal and economic schemes of knowledge and power in eighteenth-century British culture also served to accentuate spaces and phenomena defined differentially by their improbability, such as legal witnesses, the “fanciful” or primitive Highlands, and the narrowing discipline of imaginative literature. I analyze literary representations of the Highlands by English, Lowland Scottish, and Highland Scottish writers (from Samuel Johnson to Tobias Smollett to James Macpherson), focusing specifically on the overt or implicit connections between the Highlands and fanciful or imaginative forms of experience. My ultimate aim is to show how primitive Highland improbability, and its complex relation to British commercial and industrial modernization, became emblematic of literature's own complex relation to discourses of probable knowledge and that, like the Highlands, literature could be (and, indeed, was) made to serve as both an instrument of cultural hegemony and vehicle of cultural critique. |
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| ISBN: | 9780599819511 0599819510 |