Engendering Great Britain: Literary representations of Anglo -Scottish relations, 1700–1830

“Engendering Great Britain” argues that following the 1707 Union between Scotland and England Scottish writers reconfigured the nation as a sentimental, rather than a purely political, community. The dissertation takes as its point of departure a challenge issued to the people of Scotland by the Duke of Queensberry on the signing of the Treaty of Union: “to become one in Hearts and Affections, as we are inseparably joyn\u27d in Interest with our Neighbour Nation.” Drawing upon discourses of sensibility and domesticity that crossed generic boundaries, eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century writers such as Tobias Smollett, Adam Smith, Susan Ferrier, and Walter Scott looked to the family as a model of organic community united by ties of affection rather than by the “unnatural” bonds of economic and political interest. By prescribing Anglo-Scottish relations within a gendered distribution of power and a gendered division of labor, these writers imagined a British nation similarly bound through shared sympathies. They also used the home and family to examine relationships between the local, the national, and the imperial. As Britain\u27s imperial expansion transformed relations between the Lowlands, the Highlands, and metropolitan England, Scottish writers not only reassessed the Union itself, but also revised the narratives that previously had been used to describe Anglo-Scottish relations. They employed the conventions of picaresque, epistolary, gothic, and historical novels to envision the transformation of a Union of interests into a Union of affections. 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\u27s 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