The historical narrative constructed by John of Fordun in the last quarter of the fourteenth century was used as an outline by the majority of Lowland historians for the next century and a half. Only the earliest of the authors studied, John Barbour, can safely be said to have escaped being influenced by Fordun's Chronica; even Andrew of Wyntoun and the other vernacular authors, generally more independent than those who wrote in Latin, took some of Fordun's material. In the sixteenth century, John Major tried to cast aside the traditions inherited from Fordun, but his history was as unpopular as his proposal for union with England. On the other side of the debate which must have flared up after Flodden, Boece turned away from Major's proposals, took up the cherished traditions, and demanded that the Scots defend their independence as they had always done. Although most of their narratives were based on the same material, the authors' reorganization of it, what they chose to add or omit, is a reflection of their attitudes toward their nation or kingdom and of how they saw themselves within it, how they envisaged the relationship between the king and the kingdom, and their opinion of their nation. These attitudes varied from author to author, and there was seldom a neat progression from first to last thanks to the differences in personality, background, and circumstances. One broad change during the period studied was in the attitude toward the king. For Fordun, to be a Scot meant to be loyal to the person of the king, the cornerstone on whom the welfare of the kingdom depended; later authors divorced the person of the king from the crown and thought in terms of loyalty to the kingdom, state or nation. Another striking change came just with the last author to be discussed, Boece. Until his work was published, there had been no mention of a Golden Age or of such a retrogression by the Scottish nation as he harped upon. His sense of insecurity and false bravado had had no place in the earlier narratives whose authors were not only proud of their nation's independence, but were sure the Scots had the strength to maintain it.

This thesis analyses a growing metropolitan British fascination with northern Scandinavia and Scotland towards the end of the eighteenth century. These two northern regions underwent a dramatic transformation, from being places people avoided to being realms writers considered worthy of visiting, observing and narrating. This thesis examines the importance of the primitivist discourse of northern noble savagery in that transformation. While encounters with the ‘noble savage’ were largely associated with the extra-European world, the fascination with the north was in observing Europe’s very own native examples of the breed. The Highlanders and Islanders of Scotland and the northern Scandinavians, the Sami people in particular, were often romanticised in this context. Despite the Sami being celebrated in British fiction and natural-history works at the time, there has been, in contrast with Scandinavia’s ‘Vikings’, little scholarly attention given to them in a British context. The origin and function of the northern-noble-savage discourse is anchorerd in naturalhistory texts. This study emphasises the importance of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), who travelled in Lapland in 1732, in constructing idealised depictions of the Sami. Linnaeus also provided a model of domestic exploration in which naturalists produced inventories of regions and their inhabitants previously relatively unmapped by the state. Although the image of the northern savage often bore little resemblance to reality, it had real application and effect. Such imagery allowed allegedly backward regions to be incorporated into the national narrative, and through this the national community sought to benefit from these peripheries and their communities. The thesis also studies the consequences of actual encounters between metropolitan observers and the local populations of these northern regions. The travelogues of the celebrated natural historian and traveller Edward Daniel Clarke (1769-1822), who sojourned in Scotland and Scandinavia in 1797-1799, is the focus of the investigation. In a comparative analysis of his Scottish and Scandinavian accounts, this study presents Clarke as an ambivalent primitivist who both praised and condemned the Highlanders and Sami. Clarke was, for example, critical of what he regarded as the superstitious beliefs of both peoples. His narrative on the Highlanders was, however, far more positive than that on the Sami because of Clarke's adherence to racial classifications, which paradoxically Linnaeus had instigated, which demoted the Sami to mere savages. After Clarke’s death in 1822, attitudes towards the Highlanders and Sami continued to diverge against a backdrop of increased racialisation in British thought. While the Highlander became firmly integrated into a British narrative, the Sami was displaced by growing interest in a Scandinavian invader of Britain, the Viking, whose image went on to provide a robust challenge to the romanticisation of the Celtic Highlander in the century that followed. Meanwhile, the optimism over the Highlands’ economic prospects that had permeated the Linnaean project of exploration in Scotland was now gone. Whereas the idealised gaze of the eighteenth-century explorer had surveyed Highland history in order to chart a course to the future, the focus of the nineteenth-century tourist tended to be firmly on the past.

The thesis focuses on the description of the Scottish landscape, especially the Hebrides archipelago (The Lewis Trilogy - The Blackhouse, The Lewis Man, The Ches Man), in a contrast to the description of nature and landscape in the epic series of novels from the European continent (The Enzo Files) by Scottish regional author Peter May. In comparison with the description of nature and landscape and of the French countryside in The Critic, the work includes the author's narration of the city environment in the novel Extraordinary People. The work characterizes the genre of May's novels (Criminal Thriller) and examines the relationship between the descriptions of the landscape and the location of the plot with the elements of the genre mentioned (motives of tension and mystery, violence, crime and emotionally escalated life situations). The work also tries to watch the author's relationship with the region and the tradition of Scottish regional literature.

This thesis uses the minute books and manuscript magazines of Glasgow’s literary societies as evidence for my argument that the history of mutual improvement groups—including literary societies—needs to be re-written as a unique movement of ‘improvement’ during the long nineteenth century. In foregrounding the surviving records, I examine what it meant to be literary to society members in Glasgow during this period. I discuss what their motivations were for becoming so, and reflect on the impact that gender, occupation and social class had on these. I demonstrate that these groups contributed to the education and literacy of people living in the city and to a larger culture of ‘improvement’. Further, I argue that there is a case to be made for a particularly Scottish way of consuming texts in the long nineteenth century. In Glasgow, there were at least 193 literary societies during this period, which I divide into four phases of development. I provide an in-depth examination of two societies which serve as case studies. In addition, I give an overview and comparison of the 652 issues of Scottish and English society magazines I discovered in the context of a larger, ‘improving’ culture. I offer possible reasons why so many literary societies produced manuscript magazines, and show that this phenomenon was not unique to them. These magazines fostered a communal identity formed around a combination of religion, class, gender and local identity. I determine that societies in England produced similar types of magazines to those in Scotland possibly based upon the Scottish precedent. These materials substantially contribute to the evidence for nineteenth-century mutual improvement societies and their magazines, and for working- and lower-middle class Scottish readers and writers during the long nineteenth century, social groups that are under-represented in the history of reading and in Victorian studies.

This dissertation examines the constructions of gender and national identity in four of Alan Warner's novels: Morvern Callar, These Demented Lands, The Sopranos, and The Man Who Walks. I argue that Warner uses gender identity as the basis for the examination of a Scottish national identity. He uses the metaphor of the body to represent Scotland in devolution. His pregnant females are representative of "Scotland Expecting," a notion that suggests Scotland is expecting independence from England. I argue that this expectation also involves the search for a genuine Scottish identity that is not marred by the effects of colonization. Warner's male characters are emasculated and represent Scotland's mythological past. The Man Who Walks suggests that his female characters' pregnancies result in stillbirths. These stillbirths represent Scotland's inability to let go of the past in order to move towards a future independent nation.

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This Ph.D. dissertation examines the influence of Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long's novel No Mean City (1935) on the representation of working-class subjectivity in modem Scottish urban fiction. The novel helped to focus literary attention on a predominantly male, working-class, urban and realistic vision of modern Scotland. McArthur and Long explore - in their representations of destructive slum-dwelling characters - the damaging effects of class and gender on working-class identity. The controversy surrounding the book has always been intense, and most critics either deplore or downplay the full significance of No Mean City's literary impact. My dissertation re-examines one of the most disliked and misrepresented working-class novels in modern Scottish literary history. McArthur and Long's literary legacy, notwithstanding its many detractors, has become something to write against. Through examination of works by James Barke, John McNeillie, Edward Gaitens, Robin Jenkins, Bill McGhee, George Friel, William McIlvanney, Alan Spence, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Janice Galloway, Agnes Owens, Meg Henderson and A.L. Kennedy, the thesis outlines how the challenge represented by No Mean City has survived the decades following its publication. It argues that contrary to prevailing critical opinion, the novel's influence has been instrumental, not detrimental, to the evolution of modern Scottish literature. Ultimately I hope to pave the way toward a fuller, more nuanced understanding of No Mean City's remarkable impact, and to demonstrate how pervasive its legacy has been to Scottish writers from the 1930s to the 1990s.

'The Politics of Place in the Work of Hugh MacDiarmid' argues that there is no fundamental contradiction in MacDiarmid's politics, his Scottish nationalism and international communism issuing in a radical Scottish Republicanism that synchronizes the local and universal, seeking to unify the cultural and political divisions of Scotland. This thesis suggests that MacDiarmid challenges the metropolitan location of culture through a provincialist poetry and politics energized and exasperated by intimate relationship with home. It analyses the connections between MacDiarmid's ideological valorization of difference and the Scottish places from which his politics evolve. Chapter One suggests that modem Scottish cultural politics is still thirled to the imperialistic dualities of the metropolitan Scottish Enlightenment. MacDiarmid's strategic essentialism reasserts an autonomous cultural and political practice that aims to make Scotland whole. The chapter traces MacDiarmid's communism to his defiance of the churchy parochialism of Langholm. Using uncollected newspaper material, Chapters Two and Three illustrate the internationalism of MacDiarmid's localism in Montrose and Whalsay. From examining how engagement with specific places shapes MacDiarmid's politics. Chapter Four returns to analysis of the ideological construction of Scotland. The chapter explores how education has formed ideas of Scotland crucial to its political position and bound up with the specialized Scottish educational system's suppression of a Scottish Republican tradition, whose energies MacDiarmid uncovers and endeavours to release through an autodidactic generalism. Prioritizing this particularity of local culture. Chapter Five argues that the apparent contradictions in the modernist MacDiarmid's politics are best understood in terms of global capitalism's construction of mass culture, a division of labour he opposes through an internationalist poetry of generalist knowledge. This thesis finds theoretical alliance with the internationalism of Marxism and postcolonialism, synthesizing these with an autochthonous critical apparatus, declaring Hugh MacDiarmid a major modem component of a tradition of radical Scottish Republicanism.

This thesis argues that the term Kailyard is not a body of literature or cultural discourse, but a critical concept which has helped to construct controlling parameters for the discussion of literature and culture in Scotland. By offering an in-depth reading of the fiction of J.M. Barrie - the writer who is most usually and misleadingly associated with the term - and by tracing the writing career of Ian Maclaren, I argue for the need to reject the term and the critical assumptions it breeds. The introduction maps the various ways Kailyard has been employed in literary and cultural debates and shows how it promotes a critical approach to Scottish culture which focuses on the way individual writers, texts and images represent Scotland. Chapter 1 considers why this critical concern arose by showing how images of national identity and national literary distinctiveness were validated as the meaning of Scotland throughout the nineteenth century. Chapters 2-5 seek to overturn various assumptions bred by the term Kailyard. Chapter 2 discusses the early fiction of J.M. Barrie in the context of late nineteenth-century regionalism, showing how his work does not aim to depict social reality but is deliberately artificial in design. Chapter 3 discusses late Victorian debates over realism in fiction and shows how Barrie and Maclaren appealed to the reading public because of their treatment of established Victorian ideas of sympathy and the sentimental. Chapter 4 discusses Barrie's four longer novels - the works most constrained by the Kailyard term - and chapter 5 reconsiders the relationship between Maclaren's work and debates over popular culture. Chapter 6 analyses the use of the term Kailyard in twentieth-century Scottish cultural criticism. Discussing the criticism of Hugh MacDiarmid, the writing of literary histories and studies of Scottish film, history and politics, I argue for the need to reject the Kailyard term as a critical concept in the discussion of Scottish culture.