This study aims to analyse the representation of Scottish and English national identity in the tv-series Outlander (2014-). By recreating a historically influenced narrative of relations between Scotland and England, in the aftermath of the Union of 1707 and the upcoming Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the series also mediate a disputed collective British identity. Therefore, it is imperative to analyse how pop-culture functionalises memories of nations’ historical past to influence contemporary identities. First, I establish an inventory of semiotic mythic tokens of national identity. I then conduct a contextual analysis of national discursive identity on these. A further theoretical sociohistorical framework of contemporary ideology, mediated through pop-culture, materialises Outlanders impact on viewers’ own creation of identity. Through representations of myth Outlander mediates the stereotypical, romanticised image of Scottish highlanders as “superstitious barbarians” - a dualistic concept of national identity, depending on its context. To the viewer it’s an idealised image of someone rebellious, living outside the industrialised and modernised society. To the English/British soldiers it’s an image of the underdeveloped, uncivilised savage, the soldiers themselves being portrayed in Outlander as the cultivated superior in pursuit of cultural salvation for their inferior. The national discourse of both nations is symbiotic and dependent, each in need of the other’s binary identity to recreate its own. However, establishing a collective British national identity in Outlander also means a cultural sacrifice of the inferior to the superior – the cultural heritage of British identity should build on English national discourse alone. An important conclusion this study draws is the similarity between the dependency national discourses have to their binary “other” and contemporary society depending on the past in the creation of its identity. This recreational process is no longer, in a time of mass media, solely inherited by individual collective communities.

This thesis is the first in depth study that has been undertaken concerning Edinburgh and Glasgow’s identities and rivalry. It is not an economic or a social study driven solely by theory. Essentially, this is a cultural and political examination of Edinburgh and Glasgow’s identities and rivalry based on empirical evidence. It engages with theory where appropriate. Although 1752 – 1842 is the main framework for the period there are other considerations included before this period and after this timeframe. This study provides the reader with a better understanding of the ideas highlighted in the introduction and it also indicates the degrees of changes as well as continuity within the two cities. Therefore, this thesis is not a strict comparison of the two cities and neither does it provide for a complete contextual breakdown of every historical event over the course of every year. The primary focus is kept on an array of primary written sources about the two cities over the course of the period, with only brief reflections about other places, where it is deemed appropriate. The thesis is driven by the evidence it has uncovered in relation to identity and rivalry, and the study uses particular events and their impact on the two cities within a particular historical narrative. As it is a preliminary report of its kind, there are, of course, many gaps which are opportunities for further research. This is something that the conclusion of this thesis returns to. Identity and rivalry are words not attached to any particular corpus of research material but rather are buried in an array of primary sources that are wide-ranging and all encompassing. Most have been uncovered in individual collections and in the literature of the time, including newspapers, guidebooks, travellers’ accounts, civic histories, speeches, letters, and in entries for the Encyclopaedia Britannica and also the Old and New Statistical Accounts. Although historians may have examined some of this material it has not necessarily been employed by them to investigate how the cities’ identities and rivalry evolved. The period was influenced by the ideas birthed from the Enlightenment and Romanticism, by the impact of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and by the intense processes harboured by urbanisation, industrialisation and by political and social change as the Georgian city became a Victorian one, so consideration of these important aspects must be afforded, as well as the particular historians’ ideas about them and how they affected cities like Edinburgh and Glasgow within a Scottish and a British context.