Engendering Great Britain: Literary representations of Anglo-Scottish relations, 1700--1830 (Tobias Smollett, Adam Smith, Susan Ferrier, Sir Walter Scott).
- Resource Type
- Theses
- Authors
- Shields, Juliet
- Source
- Dissertation Abstracts International; Dissertation Abstract International; 65-03A.
- Subject
- Literature, English
- Language
- English
Summary: Whereas recent studies of the literary formation of British identity have described Scotland either as an integral part of the British imperial center or as a marginalized periphery, I employ its position as both one and the other to reveal the limitations of contemporary theories of nation formation from Benedict Anderson's concept of the imagined community to recent postcolonial critiques of national identity. Rather than imposing these contemporary paradigms of the nation-state onto a protean Great Britain, I follow the example of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Scottish writers themselves by taking the Union as an incitement to explore multiple meanings of nationhood and to expose competing Scottish and British identities.