Fractured voices and cultural memory: The trauma of the Highland Clearances

The Highland Clearances had a devastating and enduring effect on life in Scotland, particularly the Highlands. This dissertation investigates how the Clearances were represented in narrative form. Chapter I gives a brief history of the Clearances, discusses recent academic analysis of them, and introduces the works that comprise the rest of the study. Chapter II focuses on the early accounts of the Clearances, particularly that of Donald MacLeod, a stone mason who wrote letters to the Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle in defense of the displaced crofters. Chapter III deals with the narratives of the early Victorian tourists, outsiders who failed fully to recognize the horror of the Clearances, Queen Victoria, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Arthur Hugh Clough. Chapter IV analyzes the change represented in the late Victorian period as social awareness of the Clearances increased. John Stuart Blackie and Mathilde Blind represent the outrage that resulted in legislation protecting the crofters. Scottish Renaissance authors Hugh MacDiarmid, Neil Gunn, and Sorley MacLean are the focus of Chapter V, which centers on the use of the Clearances to present the idea of community to a modern Scottish audience. Chapter VI analyzes the ways Fionn MacColla and lain Crichton Smith, writers of the next generation, spoke against the established Church of their own time by condemning its earlier role. Finally, Chapter VII focuses on two more recent writers, historian John Prebble and playwright John McGrath, as they draw on Donald MacLeod's accounts to speak against the continued exploitation of the Highlands and Highlanders.