Scotland, Britain, Empire: Writing the Highlands, 1760-1860

"Scotland, Britain, Empire takes on a cliche that permeates writing from and about the literature of the Scottish Highlands. Popular and influential in its time, this literature fell into disrepute for circulating a distorted and deforming myth that aided in Scotland's marginalization by consigning Scottish culture into the past while drawing a mist over harsher realities." "Kenneth McNeil invokes recent work in postcolonial studies to show how British writers of the Romantic period were actually shaping a more complex national and imperial consciousness. He discusses canonical works - the works of James Macpherson and Sir Walter Scott - and noncanonical and nonliterary works - particularly in the fields of historiography, anthropology, and sociology. This book calls for a rethinking of the "romanticization" of the Highlands and shows that Scottish writing on the Highlands reflects the unique circumstances of a culture simultaneously feeling the weight of imperial "anglobalization" while playing a vital role in its inception."--BOOK JACKET.