Blackwood’s Pastoralism and the Highland Clearances

This chapter shows how, through a recurring discourse of ‘pastoralism’, Blackwood’s used the lingering traumas of the Highland Clearances as an opportunity to develop new literary conventions. Rather than seeing pastoral as merely concomitant with the Blackwood’s circle’s reactionary Toryism, we should recognize that Blackwood’s and its authors were operating in a more complex ‘post-pastoral’ register that challenged modernity’s exploitation of the natural world while conceding art’s reliance on modern, exploitative, destructive impulses. Such post-pastoral tensions were especially pronounced in Blackwood’s running commentary on agrarian reform, rural economics, and the Highland Clearances.

Between Literary Idealisation and Historical Decline

By 1827, the destruction of the clan system, the Highland clearances and the commercialisation of the Highlands has by large left the traditional Highland way of life a thing of the past. Nevertheless, the Highlander reappears in the late 18th and early 19th century as an increasingly dominant literary figure. Addressing the discrepancy between the historical Highlander and the literary figure, the Highlander is identified as a multifaceted figure ranging from romantic idealisation to necessary decline. In this article, it is argued that the combination of the assimilation of the actual Highlanders, the centrality of the Highlander as a military hero fighting in British service and the rise of the Highlander as an idealised literary figure is what renders the elevation of the Highlander to national symbol possible.

Pissing On the Past: The Highland Clearances, Effigial Resistance and the Everyday Politics of the Urinal

When and where one can urinate is increasingly politicised around the globe. As an example of bio-political power, the provision, regulation and access to public toilets reflects larger structures in any given society. However, there is another side to micturition, that is the use of urine as a manifestation of bodily power over another/others. This article analyses the politics of the urinal through a close reading of the men’s toilet in The Lismore pub in Partick, Scotland, thus bringing together these two threads via the concept of everyday effigial resistance. In our interrogation of a politicised urinal that asks users to ‘piss’ on historical figures associated with the Highland Clearances, we aim to push International Relations to follow Enloe’s call for the study of ‘mundane practices… and the most intimate spaces’ by considering the most banal aspects of the human condition as part of its remit. Our case study serves as an explicit political intervention, one which through its geographic and geopolitical scales makes an argument for engaging with the mundane, vernacular and vulgar in everyday IR. Pisser sur le passé : les dédouanements des hautes terres, la résistance à l’effigie et la politique quotidienne de l’urinoir

Unmuting the Subaltern through Linguistic Hybridisation: Gaelicisations and their Functionality in Trauma-Related Novels by Fionn Mac Colla and Neil M. Gunn

One of the essential objectives of the modernist Scottish Renaissance movement was to re-develop a strong national Scottish identity by emphasising the Celtic-Gaelic heritage. Authors such as Neil M. Gunn or Fionn Mac Colla pursued this aim by functionalising Gaelicised English in their texts, which relate to trauma events of the nineteenth century. Gaelicised English is defined as the usage of Gaelic vocabulary and Gaelic grammatical patterns within the framework of English as a superstrate text tissue. In this article, many examples of Gaelicised English taken from Mac Colla's novel And the Cock Crew (1945) and from Gunn's Butcher's Broom (1934) will be presented and contextualised. These Gaelicisations can be considered as key components of a linguistic hybridity which challenges the master metanarrative of the nineteenth-century Highland Clearances and the discourse of the Improvements. The question to be answered in the last part of this text will be if these novels and their linguistic hybridity can help to process the trauma of the Clearances by giving a voice to a muted Highland subalternity.