My dissertation argues that national tropes are continually in a state of flux as
they are employed to respond to historical, socio-political and cultural events and trends,
and demonstrates that their state at a specific moment encapsulates struggles between
various concepts of national identity. I trace shifts in the configuration of Anglo-Scottish
relations by undertaking a microanalysis of two specific recurring tropological categories
- familial and homosocial tropes — in a number of key moments in cross-border relations
between 1707 and 1830.
The first chapter, directed at the years surrounding the Union of Parliaments,
traces the suppression of cross-border dissonance in homosocial egalitarian tropes which
define Anglo-Scottish relations in the work of pro-union pamphleteers, and contrasts this
strategy of containment with the disruptive presence of familial tropes in the pamphlets
of anti-union writers. The second chapter traces the reappearance of this conflict in the
decade following Culloden. Roderick Random, written from the margins by Tobias
Smollett, reveals a discomfort with unifying tropes, although it ends with a cursory
gesture towards a national marital union. James Ramble, in contrast, written by the
English Edward Kimber, deflects dissonance onto Jacobitism, suggesting through tropes
of friendship that all aspects of Anglo-Scottish relations are seamlessly integrated into
British unity.
Chapters three and four foreground the 1760s, a decade in which Scottish agency,
in the person of Lord Bute, the Lord Treasurer, seems to reach new heights. Yet it is also
a decade of rampant Scotophobia, incited by the Wilkites to undermine Bute's authority.
Tropological warfare is an important element of this rhetorical conflict. In chapters five
and six, I uncover two competing concepts of Britishness, primarily created by English
and Irish writers, which emerge in the 1790s. The first engages with homosocial tropes to
foreground Scottish agency in nation-building and empire-building projects, but does so
at the expense of a distinct Scottish culture. The second, also produced by English and
Irish writers, reifies and celebrates Scottish culture through tropes of cross-border
courtship, but tends to represent the emergent concept as endangered, lacking national
agency. Chapter six analyzes the Scottish response to this tropological binary.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/14743 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Alker, Sharon |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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