The ruins of experience : Scotland's "romantick" Highlands and the birth of the modern witness
"A brilliant study of legal events and of literary texts concerned with the Scottish Highlands in the late eighteenth to nineteenth century, which then provides a structure for exploring the decay of and nostalgia for experience in subsequent culture."-Tilottama Rajan, University of Western Ontario
Print Book, English, ©2007
University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, ©2007
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xv, 252 pages ; 24 cm
9780812239713, 0812239717
72161919
Preface : Scottish highland romance : a reappraisal
Introduction : experience and the allure of the improbable
1. A musket shot and its echoes : the Romantick origins of the modern witness
2. Aftershocks of the Appin murder : Scott, Stevenson, and "storytell[ing]"
3. Evidence and equivalence : the parallel logics of proof and progress
4. Improvement and apocalypse : afterimages of the "promised land" of modern romance
5. The compulsions of immediacy : Macpherson, Wilkomirski, and their Fragments controversies
6. Of mourning and machinery : contrasting techniques of highland vision
7. Highland romance in late modernity
Texts examined include: poems, novels, philosophical texts, travel narratives, contemporary theory, and evidential treatises and trial narratives