Sarah Sharp

Whilst Highlandism and Tartanry have come to dominate popular ideas of Scottish identity during the nineteenth century, one of the primary modes of imagining Scotland in literature and print media was as a nation of humble cottage dwellers. This myth of ‘cottage Scotland’ emerges simultaneously with a massive upsurge in Scottish activities abroad. My work so far has traced how this archetype is exported across the growing peripheries of the British world.

During my time at IASH I will work on an important case study for this project: that of the Ulster ‘kailyard’. In the final years of the nineteenth century a new strain of prose writing emerges in Ulster that appears to directly draw on contemporary Scottish literary trends. I am interested in examining the ways that these texts both echo and diverge from their Scottish and Colonial contemporaries. What political and social uses might Ulster writers and readers put this set of images to? How might the concerns of the Ulster ‘kailyard’ change or challenge my existing reading of the relationship between Scotland and the world during the long nineteenth century?