The Ruins of Experience: Scotland's "Romantick" Highlands and the Birth of the Modern WitnessThere emerged, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, a reflexive relationship between shifting codes of legal evidence in British courtrooms and the growing fascination throughout Europe with the "primitive" Scottish Highlands. New methods for determining evidential truth, linked with the growing prominence of lawyers and a formalized division of labor between witnesses and jurors, combined to devalue the authority of witness testimony, magnifying the rupture between experience and knowledge. Juries now pronounced verdicts based not upon the certainty of direct experience but rather upon abstractions of probability or reasonable likelihood. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 63
... British national identity during the eighteenth century. And janet Sorensen's The Grammar of Empire (2000) reflected rigorously on the recurrent dynamics of core and periphery (e.g., “British” versus “Celtic”) in the linguistic (and, by ...
... British peripheries, Sorensen traces the cultural modalities through which such identities historically emerged in Britain, pre— serving while revising Hechter's model of core and periphery as a way of addressing British hierarchies of ...
... British Image, Pittock underscored the historical power of romance in the formation of national identities, Celtic or other.12 More self-consciously than most, Pittock's work divulges the fungibility of reality and romance—and the ...
... British national identity) do not escape the taint of ideology and self-misrecognition. As he put it in a famous pastiche of the opening lines of The Communist Manifesto, “A specter haunts the revolutionary imagination: the phantom of ...
... British national identities. Our contemporary rage for discourse derives from the model of knowledge which was born during the eighteenth century. This is why, for Foucault, these issues do not beg an elaboration on what discourses ...
Contents
Experience and the Allure of the Improbable | 1 |
STRUCTURE | 21 |
FEELING | 109 |
Notes | 199 |
225 | |
241 | |
Acknowledgments | 251 |
Other editions - View all
The Ruins of Experience: Scotland's "Romantick" Highlands and the Birth of ... Matthew Wickman No preview available - 2007 |