Scotland’s Atlantic Visions, 1660–1691

2021 ◽  
pp. 80-129
Author(s):  
Kirsten Sandrock
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Colonial Literature ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Six Nations ◽  
Middle Colonies ◽  
Atlantic Slavery ◽  
Atlantic Literature

This chapter focuses on Scottish Atlantic literature from the 1660s to the early 1690s. It explores how colonial utopian writing broadened in the mid-seventeenth century to include drama, life writing, legal sources, and abolitionist texts, including not only literature directly linked to Atlantic expansion but also texts usually associated with domestic Scottish literature, such as Thomas Sydserf's Tarugo's Wiles: Or, the Coffee-House (1668) or Archibald Pitcairne's The Assembly; Or, Scotch Reformation (1691). Engaging with recent works on Scotland's role in Atlantic slavery and the Black Atlantic, the chapter seeks to broaden understandings of how Scottish literature and culture participated in the development of the Black Atlantic and Eurocentric thought. The chapter further looks at legal and governmental sources relating to New Jersey and the Middle Colonies from the 1680s onwards, at abolitionist writings, and texts that pertain to the Six Nations and indigenous populations of the Americas. All of these bring out the paradoxes of possession versus dispossession and of freedom versus enslavement in Scottish colonial literature. They illustrate how aesthetic devices of utopianism work towards spatializing the colonial sphere and trying to stabilize boundaries between colonizing and colonized subjects.

Darien, the Golden Dream

2021 ◽  
pp. 130-185
Author(s):  
Kirsten Sandrock
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Colonial Literature ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
Isthmus Of Panama ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Uk

This chapter focuses on literary and cultural works dealing with Scotland's attempt to colonize Darien, at the Isthmus of Panama, in the 1690s. It establishes Darien as a central trope in Scottish literature by analyzing works from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, including novels, poetry, drama, songs, and political treatises by William Paterson, William Burnaby, Eliot Warburton, Douglas Galbraith, David Nicol, Alistair Beaton, and anonymous female authors. It illustrates how these depictions interact with other political and ideological trajectories in Scotland and the UK, including Jacobitism, Anglo-Scottish relations, and revisionist historical writing. The chapter establishes images of Darien gold and material possession as central structuring devices of Scottish colonial literature, which stand in conflict with depictions of Scotland's alleged kindness towards the indigenous populations of Panama. The chapter argues that narratives of benevolence together with narratives of gold and material possessions turn the colonial utopian tradition into a full-fledged myth of the Scottish Atlantic by the end of the seventeenth century. The mythologization of the colonial sphere together with the mythologization of the Scottish settlers functions as an aesthetic instrument to enter the competition over power in the late-seventeenth-century Atlantic.

Scottish Colonial Literature

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Sandrock
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Colonial Literature ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Utopian Literature ◽  
Isthmus Of Panama ◽  
Colonial And Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Atlantic Literature ◽  
The Relationship

Scottish Colonial Literature is a comprehensive study of Scottish colonial writing before 1707. It brings together previously dispersed sources to argue for a tradition of Scottish colonial literature before the Union of Parliaments. It introduces the term colonial utopian literature to frame the intricate relationship between colonialism and utopianism in the seventeenth century. Offering case studies relating to colonial undertakings at Nova Scotia (1620s), East New Jersey (1680s) and at the Isthmus of Panama, then known as Darien (1690s), Scottish Colonial Literature explores how literature and culture shaped Scotland's colonial ventures in the seventeenth century. In addition, it considers works written in the larger context of the Scottish Atlantic so as to illuminate how the Atlantic shaped seventeenth-century Scottish literature and vice versa. One key question running through the book is the relationship between art and ideology. Textual narratives were powerful instruments of empire-building throughout the early modern period. This book focuses on utopianism as a framework that authors used to claim power over the Atlantic. In the Scottish context, the intersections between utopianism and colonialism shed light on the ambiguous narratives of possession and dispossession as well as internal and external colonialism in Scottish colonial writing of the seventeenth century. Scottish Colonial Literature enters debates about Scotland's position in colonial and postcolonial studies through its focus on pre-1707 Atlantic literature.

Introduction: Scottish Colonial Literature, 1603–1707

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Kirsten Sandrock
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Colonial Literature ◽  
Utopian Literature ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlantic Literature

This chapter establishes the book's key claim that Scottish colonial literature in the seventeenth century is poised between narratives of possession and dispossession. It introduces the term colonial utopian literature to frame the intricate relationship between colonialism and utopianism in the seventeenth century. The chapter uses the instances of book burnings in Edinburgh and London in 1700 that revolved around Scotland's colonial venture in Darien as a starting point for the discussion to make a case for the centrality of literary texts in the history of Scottish colonialism. In addition, it introduces the historical context of seventeenth-century Scottish colonialism, especially in relation to the emergent British Empire, inner-British power dynamics, and other European imperial projects. On a theoretical level, the chapter enters debates about Scotland's position in colonial and postcolonial studies through its focus on pre-1707 Atlantic literature. It also makes a fresh argument about Atlantic writing contributing to the transformation of utopian literature from a fictional towards a reformist genre.

Scottish Romanticism and Collective Memory in the British Atlantic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth McNeil
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Age Of Revolution ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Critical Site

Charting the transatlantic movements of Scottish literature in the Age of Revolution, this book provides an in-depth examination of Scottish Romantic literary ideas on memory and their influence among various cultures in the British Atlantic. The book brings into relief a distinct Scottish historiography, in which a temporality of modernity takes shape in the forms, tropes and categories of a mode of historical understanding we now would term collective or cultural memory. The study traces this emergent mode in Scottish history writing, both fictional and non-fictional, as it circulated throughout the Atlantic world. It offers a threefold engagement with Scottish Romantic, transatlantic and memory studies while drawing from the perspectives and insights of other critical frameworks – such as indigenous, Black Atlantic and francophone Canada. Examining a range of writing modes such as memoirs, slave narratives and emigrant fiction in various regional and national contexts, the book covers familiar Scottish writers, such as Walter Scott and John Galt, and less familiar ones, such as Anne Grant, Thomas Pringle, and John Gabriel Stedman. It follows other recent studies in making the case for the Atlantic world as a critical site in the making of a culture of modernity while bringing to light the fundamental contribution of Scottish Romantic writing to this culture.

scholarly journals Hunting Captain Henley: Finding Fascism in the Reflective Voice

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. C1-C20
Author(s):  
Kenneth Pratt
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Standard English ◽  
British Army ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Narrative Technique ◽  
Literary Structure

This paper explores how a reflective analysis of the literary structure of one’s own life writing can often lead to an exceptional intellectual discovery. The paper focuses on a particular narrative technique that developed during a journalistic investigation into the whereabouts of an English Army Captain who had allegedly bullied my dad in the British Army. Examples are drawn from a range of literary theorists and from the author’s own prose and critical evaluation. It is argued that the occupation of one language by another can generate a form of linguistic hyper-energy and from it the birth of what is described as Scotland’s Fascist Voice. Scots dialect’s uneasy alliance with Standard English in turn highlights Caledonian Antisyzygy, a term first coined by Gregory Smith in Scottish Literature: Character and Influence to spotlight the zigzag of contradictions at the heart of Scottish writing. The overall aim of the paper is to reveal a strong interdependence between literary theory and life writing.The subtext concludes that in isolation each offers restricted forms of expression, yet when blended can exhibit an independent intelligence free from the shackles of both conventional autobiography and traditional academic enquiry.

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