Stepping Westward is the first book dedicated to the literature of the Scottish Highland tour of 1720-1830, a major cultural phenomenon that attracted writers and artists like Pennant, Johnson and Boswell, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Hogg, Keats, Daniell, and Turner, as well as numerous less celebrated travellers and tourists. Addressing more than a century's worth of literary and visual representations of the Highlands, the book casts
new light on how the tour developed a modern literature of place, acting as a catalyst for thinking about improvement, landscape, and the shaping of British, Scottish, and Gaelic identities.
It pays attention to the relationship between travellers and the native Gaels, whose world was plunged into crisis by rapid and forced social change. At the book's core lie the best-selling tours of Pennant and Dr Johnson, associated with attempts to 'improve' the intractable Gaidhealtachd in the wake of Culloden. Alongside the Ossian craze and Gilpin's picturesque, their books stimulated a wave of 'home tours' from the 1770s through the romantic period, including writing
by women like Sarah Murray and Dorothy Wordsworth. The incidence of published Highland Tours (many lavishly illustrated), peaked around 1800, but as the genre reached exhaustion, the 'romantic
Highlands' were reinvented in Scott's poems and novels, coinciding with steam boats and mass tourism, but also rack-renting, sheep clearance, and emigration.
Author Biography:
Nigel Leask is Regius Chair in English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is an internationally recognised scholar who has published widely on British and especially Scottish romantic literature and culture, with a special emphasis on empire, orientalism, travel writing, and 'improvement'. His most recent monograph is Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-century Scotland (OUP 2010), which won the
Saltire Prize for the best research monograph in 2010. His edition of Robert Burns's Commonplace Books, Tour Journals and Miscellaneous Prose, the first volume of the Oxford Edition of Robert Burns's Writings, was
published in 2014. He is CI of the AHRC funded 'Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour, 1750-1820' (2014-18). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Vice-President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies.
