During the first quarter of the eighteenth century, Scotland was persistently viewed as a peripheral region, inhabited by savage Highlanders, epitomising the sublime and the grotesque as well as the distance of the Scottish Other from civilised Europe. However, the rediscovery of the Ossianic tradition, the Scottish link to the Norman invasion and the increasing appeal of Scottish historical narratives to the average Victorian set the pattern for the reconstruction of a literary utopia. Facing the risk of racial segregation due to their Celtic background, a significant number of Scottish writers and theorists succumbed to the rising Anglo-Saxonism, seeking every means to prove their Anglo-Saxon background at the expense of their Celtic roots. This volume includes a set of travel narratives and essays on Scotland, covering a period of more than two centuries (1722-1907). The travellers who flocked to Scotland were either driven by literary aspirations, or were on a mission to explore the country’s wild inhabitants, the Highlanders. In their attempt to define Scottish identity in accordance with the cultural, ideological and political standards of the English, Scottish and American travel writers often adhered to the Othering of the Scottish people, promoting images of backwardness and the sublime.

A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish Literature offers a comprehensive, comparative and generic analysis of developments of travel writing in Anglophone and Polish literature from the Late Medieval Period to the twenty-first century. These developments are depicted in a wider context of travel narratives written in other European languages.

Scotland, Britain, Empire takes on a cliché 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. While writers from both sides of the Highland line looked to the traditions, language, and landscape of the Highlands to define their national character, the Highlands were deemed the space of the primitive--like other spaces around the globe brought under imperial sway. But this concern with the value and fate of indigenousness was in fact a turn to the modern.

Curious Travellers: Writing the Welsh Tour, 1760-1820 provides the first extensive literary study of British tours of Wales in the Romantic period (c.1760-1820). It examines writers' responses to Welsh landscapes and communities at a time of drastic economic, environmental, and political change. Opening with an overview of Welsh tours up to the early 1700s, Mary-Ann Constantine shows how the intensely intertextual nature of the genre imbued particular sites and locations with meaning. She next draws upon a range of manuscript and published sources to trace a circular tour of the country, unpicking moments of cultural entanglement and revealing how travel-writing shaped understanding of Wales and Welshness within the wider British polity. Wales became a popular destination for visitors following the publication of Thomas Pennant's Tours in Wales in the late 1770s. Hundreds of travel-accounts from the period are extant, yet few (particularly those by women) have been studied in depth. Wales proves, in these narratives, as much a place of disturbance as a picturesque haven--a potent mixture of medieval past and industrial present, exposed down its west coast to the threat of invasion during the Napoleonic Wars. From castles to copper-mines, Constantine explores the full potential of tour writing as an idiosyncratic genre at the interface of literature and history, arguing for its vital importance to broader cultural and environmental studies.

'This solitude, the romance and wild loveliness of everything here . . . all make beloved Scotland the proudest, finest country in the world.' Queen Victoria (1819-1901) wrote a diary nearly every day of her life. Originally intended for private circulation, later expanded to appeal to a wider public, these published diary entries cover not only the family holidays at Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands which the Queen and Prince Albert enjoyed up until his death in 1861, but also the Queen's journeys - as sovereign and as "Royal Tourist" - around Scotland, Ireland, and other regions within the British Isles. The books offer intimate views of the most important woman of her time as she shares her love of her family and of the Highlands, and demonstrates her intense interest in all corners of her realm and in the lives of individuals from all classes of society. Queen Victoria's writings about her life and travels in Scotland and the British Isles are fascinating and entertaining to read. Extremely popular when they first appeared, they shaped Victoria's image in the nineteenth century, and their impact on public perceptions of the monarchy continues to this day. This volume includes complete and authoritative texts of the two journals; an introduction and explanatory endnotes providing historical and cultural contexts and new information about the Queen's work as author and editor; maps of the Queen's travels; a Cast of Characters briefly identifying many of the individuals the Queen meets or mentions; a Glossary of unfamiliar terms; and Suggestions for Further Reading. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This is a book about what people imagine it means to live in a world where private property is dominant, and their fears – and sometimes hopes – about living in a future world where private property has disappeared. In the propertied imagination, private property is a fragile thing, an institution beset by terrifying enemies and racialised and gendered mobs: Levellers and Diggers, socialists and anarchists, fervent religious radicals, abolitionists, feminists, and haughty welfare-state bureaucrats. The history of private property is the history of a recurring nightmare that one or another of these groups would storm the castle and take control. That threatened social chaos is the central unifying story of this book. Private property and the fear of social chaos starts by charting the thinkers who laid the foundations for how we understand private property, including Locke, Burke, Marx and Engels. The book looks at how their ideas have been put into practice in ways that continue to shape the modern world, from Harry Truman’s housing policies and the anti-abolitionist George Fitzhugh to Margaret Thatcher and Elon Musk. Arguing that the spectre of ‘the mob’ has been intimately interconnected with the idea of private property throughout capitalist modernity, the book ambitiously narrates this history from the early colonisation of the Americas to Silicon Valley, and the future of human colonisation in space.

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, legions of English citizens headed north. Why and how did Scotland, once avoided by travelers, become a popular site for English tourists? In Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 1770-1914, Katherine Haldane Grenier uses published and unpublished travel accounts, guidebooks, and the popular press to examine the evolution of the idea of Scotland. Though her primary subject is the cultural significance of Scotland for English tourists, in demonstrating how this region came to occupy a central role in the Victorian imagination, Grenier also sheds light on middle-class popular culture, including anxieties over industrialization, urbanization, and political change; attitudes towards nature; nostalgia for the past; and racial and gender constructions of the "other." Late eighteenth-century visitors to Scotland may have lauded the momentum of modernization in Scotland, but as the pace of economic, social, and political transformations intensified in England during the nineteenth century, English tourists came to imagine their northern neighbor as a place immune to change. Grenier analyzes the rhetoric of tourism that allowed visitors to adopt a false view of Scotland as untouched by the several transformations of the nineteenth century, making journeys there antidotes to the uneasiness of modern life. While this view was pervasive in Victorian society and culture, and deeply marked the modern Scottish national identity, Grenier demonstrates that it was not hegemonic. Rather, the variety of ways that Scotland and the Scots spoke for themselves often challenged tourists' expectations.

One of the earliest documented Scottish song collectors actually to go 'into the field' to gather his specimens, was the Highlander Joseph Macdonald. Macdonald emigrated in 1760 - contemporaneously with the start of James Macpherson's famous but much disputed Ossian project - and it fell to the Revd. Patrick Macdonald to finish and subsequently publish his younger brother's collection. Karen McAulay traces the complex history of Scottish song collecting, and the publication of major Highland and Lowland collections, over the ensuing 130 years. Looking at sources, authenticity, collecting methodology and format, McAulay places these collections in their cultural context and traces links with contemporary attitudes towards such wide-ranging topics as the embryonic tourism and travel industry; cultural nationalism; fakery and forgery; literary and musical creativity; and the move from antiquarianism and dilettantism towards an increasingly scholarly and didactic tone in the mid-to-late Victorian collections. Attention is given to some of the performance issues raised, either in correspondence or in the paratexts of published collections; and the narrative is interlaced with references to contemporary literary, social and even political history as it affected the collectors themselves. Most significantly, this study demonstrates a resurgence of cultural nationalism in the late nineteenth century.

Through an examination of numerous biographies, from the lives of working-class scientists to minor women writers, Victorian Biography Reconsidered examines how and why nineteenth-century biographers challenged the contemporary obsession with 'Great Men' and brought to public attention the lives of neglected or unknown men and women.