Search

Our essay studies three early-nineteenth century autobiographical texts written by young Scottish Gaels who narrate their sense of dislocation in the 'Gaelic' Atlantic. Dugald MacNicol's journal (1809–1813), written entirely in Gaelic, describes leaving Argyll for Barbados as a young army officer. Memoirs of Charles Campbell (1828) was written in a Glasgow prison, after Campbell had murdered his wife in a fit of insanity, following his service on a Jamaican slave plantation. William MacGillivray's English-language Hebridean journal (1817–1818), describes the author's sojourn, while a student, on the island of Harris. We examine these journals in the context of Romantic-era travel literature and conclude with thoughts on the relationship between an increasingly stressed Gaelic culture at home and the emergence of a 'Gaelic' Atlantic within the British imperial world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the role of Celtic languages in Romantic-period travel writing and their impact on narrative construction. Topics include the misrepresentation of travel experiences due to ignoring language differences, the evolving scholarship on Romanticism challenging traditional anglophone perspectives, and the significance of linguistic diversity in understanding Romantic-era Britain.

The article studies romanticism opens up new perspectives on the relationship between British Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution. Topics discussed including the dominance of a retrospective view entrenched in a notion of deep antagonism between industrialization and canonical Romanticism as a compensatory humanism, the Romantic component of nineteenth-century social criticism, and the rise of ecocriticism in the late 20th century.

The article focuses on the exploration of language and landscape in relation to cultural heritage. Topics include the investigation of heritage management accommodating linguistic questions, the collaborative project "Curious Travellers," and the under-researched question of language in Romanticism and travel writing.

Ossian scholarship has moved beyond questions of forgery and authenticity to consider the poems' international influence as a founding text of European Romanticism. Building on recent work in translation studies, this essay considers Ossian as the first substantial attempt to translate Gaelic poetry into English, exploring Macpherson's relationship to his Gaelic sources, and his rejection of contemporary 18th century anglophone translation codes. Influenced by the theories of Hugh Blair and other members of the Scottish Enlightenment, Macpherson rendered traditional Gaelic heroic ballads in a highly figurative prose poetry, couched in the language of the sublime and the primitive. In conclusion, the essay turns to the posthumously published 'Gaelic' Ossian which turns out to be largely a back-translation of the 1760's 'English' text. Yet Macpherson stimulated interest in Gaelic culture at a time of crisis, and his 'foreignizing' effect created an influential translation paradigm for Gaelic poetry and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If Ossian validated the Highland landscape for eighteenth-century tourists, the landscape, in turn, seemed to authenticate poems whose authenticity never ceased to be doubted; but text and topography alike ran the risk of dissolving into insubstantiality. Many tourists cited 'local tradition' in order to embroider existing (or to invent new) Fingalian place-names. Ranging over a wide variety of eighteenth-century travel-writers, this article casts new light on the relations between Ossian, travel-writing and Highland topography. It concludes by discussing the 'fieldwork' tradition of Ossianic tourism after 1800, which sought out local tradition bearers, rather than attempting to authenticate Macpherson's 'translations'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concentrating on manifestations of the 'equestrian sublime' in the work of Burns and Byron, and especially in 'Tam o'Shanter' and Mazeppa, this essay suggests that while both poets use the 'wild ride' as a metaphor for liberty, their horses acquire a life beyond serving as metaphors for the difficult relationship between reason and passion, culture and nature. Byron's Mazeppa is the more elaborate in refining a moral lesson: Mazeppa learns a middle course between wildness and repression, manifest in the care he lavishes on his well-trained steed. Burns's 'Tam o'Shanter' remains 'whaur extremes meet', its human protagonist a feckless creature compared to his 'noble Maggie', and the poem employs the civilised pleasures of imagination to defy the supernatural interdictions of Calvinism. Nevertheless, the abiding image of both poems is not so much the hard-won wisdom of riderly experience as the frisson of the 'wild ride' itself. It was this that so enthralled the nineteenth-century public and ensured the enduring popularity of these two equestrian poems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Thomas Muir's democratic cosmopolitanism as interpreted by the poem "The Telegraph: A Consolatory Epistle from Thomas Muir, Esq., of Botany Bay, to the Hon. Henry Erskine." It notes that Muir's name was seen on the title page of the poem published in 1796 which led to confusion, but closer scrutiny shows that the poem was actually an anti-jacobin squib, which the 18th-century Short Title Catalogue attributes to the Reverend George Hamilton of Gladsmuir. It states that the poem interpreted Muir's rhetorical question to the Prosecution during his trial, attacked Muir's Calvinism, and concluded with Muir's request to Erskine that he be appointed as Lord Chancellor of the dark domains.

Focuses on the writings related to Irish revolution by author Theobald Wolfe Tone and American novelist Charles Brockden Brown. Civilization of the barbaric aboriginal inhabitants of Abraxus; Accumulation of private wealth; Ramification of Irish republican immigration to the United States.

Discusses Jonathan Livingstone Lowes' contention in 'The Road to Xanadu' that the poem 'Kubla Khan' was inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's wide reading in the literature of travel. Other contemporary travelogues that were important to Coleridge's poem; Determination of the geopolitical meaning of the poem; Aspects of the poem's topography.