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From Walter Scott to Cormac Mccarthy: Scottish Romanticism and the Novel from the American South

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From Walter Scott to Cormac Mccarthy: Scottish Romanticism and the Novel from the American South 1 From Walter Scott to Cormac McCarthy: Scottish Romanticism and the Novel from the American South Antonia Spencer, BA (Hons.), MA September 2018 Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy This thesis is the work of the author and has not been submitted in substantially the same form for the award of a higher degree elsewhere. 2 From Walter Scott to Cormac McCarthy: Scottish Romanticism and the Novel from the American South Antonia Spencer, BA (Hons.), MA Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. September 2018 This thesis argues for the previously underemphasized influence of Scottish Romantic-era writing on the novel from the US South, demonstrating the formative impact of writers such as Walter Scott and James Hogg on the development of Southern writing, but also the ways in which Southern writers critique and revise this heritage. The thesis illustrates the significance of transatlantic connections between regional sections of nation-states, links which complicate conventional centre-periphery models of cultural exchange. My theoretical approach draws on contemporary theories of materiality in the work of Manuel Delanda and Tim Ingold, which I use to emphasize the significance of objects and material processes in the representation of temporality in the literature of the Scottish Romantic and Southern US 3 traditions. I analyse Scottish Romanticism’s emphasis on uneven historical transitions as a method of revising Scottish Enlightenment Conjectural history. This mode of critiquing progressive narratives of historical development is also a structuring principle in the Southern novel, where it is used to articulate a disjunctive regional temporality in opposition to teleological narratives of nation-state history. Chapter one analyses the work of Walter Scott and examines key Waverley novels in terms of those aspects which would be most significant for Southern US writing: the motif of the border and depictions of primitivism. My second chapter considers James Hogg and Edgar Allan Poe as related writers of Gothic short fiction in a transatlantic literary scene dominated by Scott’s legacy and the Scottish periodicals. The third chapter analyses Mark Twain’s travel writing and three of his novels to explore his response to Scottish Romanticism in his depictions of Southern domestic objects. Chapter four examines the writing of William Faulkner and his portrayals of Scottish planter dynasties in his fictional Mississippi. My final chapter analyses Cormac McCarthy’s fiction and his violent revisions of Scott’s border narratives. 4 Acknowledgements I am grateful to Mr Tony Pinkney for his committed supervision of this research. I am also indebted to Professor Keith Hanley, Dr Brian Baker, Dr Andrew Tate, and Dr Jo Carruthers for their contributions and advice throughout the writing of this thesis. This research would not have been possible without the award of a fee-waiver bursary from Lancaster University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences during my first year. I am also grateful for, and very fortunate to have received, two subsequent years of full funding from The Arts and Humanities Research Council North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership. I give sincere thanks to family and friends for their support and guidance, and for helping to keep me motivated throughout the last four years. 5 Contents Introduction 6 Chapter 1: Walter Scott, Scottish Romanticism and American Receptions 41 Chapter 2: (Dis)Locating the Regional: James Hogg, Edgar Allan Poe and Transatlantic Romanticism 107 Chapter 3: Mark Twain and Scottish Romanticism: Temporality, Materiality and Performance in the Postbellum South 158 Chapter 4: ‘From Culloden to Carolina’: William Faulkner and Scottish Romanticism 202 Chapter 5: Reimagining the Frontier: Scottish Romanticism and the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy 242 Conclusion 288 Bibliography 298 6 Introduction In elucidating the influence of Scottish Enlightenment thought on the development of American ideas of nationhood, Susan Manning has argued that the two poles of American modernity – the concepts of independence and cohesion – which are expressed in the drive to unite disparate and fragmented regions into a diverse national whole, are also characteristic of the project of Scottish Enlightenment thought. In the Scottish context, this emphasis on unity versus independence stemmed from a need to understand and theorize a new United Kingdom, one which could integrate Scottish historical and cultural distinctiveness, ‘Scotland underwent – debated, theorized, experienced, resisted, imagined – union before the American colonies; the literature that emerged from this experience inevitably proved potent when the colonists began to formulate their own responses to a crisis in their relationship with England.’1 This focus on the nature of national ‘union’ was certainly crucial for emergent American identity and for Scotland’s cultural and political negotiation of ‘Britishness’ in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet when we narrow our focus to the American South we find the legacy of secession and Civil War also driving cultural debates about ‘Union’ and drawing on Scottish cultural models in a similar way to that of the United States when it first emerged from British rule. This critical stance toward the 1 Susan Manning, Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p.4. 7 formation and cohesion of the nation-state is a fundamental part of my analysis of the Scottish Romantic influences in Southern writing – in which I will demonstrate that Scottish literature from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was pivotal in the way in which certain Southern authors narrated their region’s history, often in contrast to the history of the nation- state itself. Through a careful examination of their literary traditions and interactions, Scotland and the American South can offer models of literature untethered to a dominant nation-state narrative, and which may in fact offer a more critical perspective on the construction of such narratives. The method of cross comparison, while bringing into focus the colonial legacies in both regions, also allows for an understanding of changing Scottish and Southern cultures outside of South/North or Scottish/Anglo-British binaries.2 While in the nineteenth century Scotland underwent rapid modernization, the American South remained largely agrarian, and despite the upheavals of Civil War and reconstruction it still maintained more rigid divisions of race, gender and class in contrast to the industrializing North. Just as scholarship on Southern literature is currently being reoriented toward its climatic, cultural and economic links with the Caribbean and Latin America, so criticism of Scottish literature can equally benefit from studying its transatlantic or hemispheric connections, thus bypassing an excessive focus on the influence 2 For a deeper discussion of what methods of transatlantic comparative literary studies can offer, see Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, eds., Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 8 of Britishness on the development of Scottish culture.3 It is within this international focus in Scottish and Southern studies that my project is founded. The central aims of this thesis are two-fold; firstly, to map and analyse the substantial influence of Scottish Romantic-era writing on the novel in the Southern United States and, secondly, to mine these historical and literary relationships for a greater understanding of how sub-national, noncosmopolitan geographies relate to each other and to a shared experience of an uneven ‘modernity’. By ‘modernity’ in the context of this study I mean to designate the rational, metropolitan, liberalizing and ‘improving’ projects characteristic of, but by no means limited to, the theorizations of the Scottish Enlightenment, with its focus on the modern civic state.4 My study treats the literary traditions of Scotland and the South on their own terms and through their relationship with each other, rather than assessing them with respect to their more culturally dominant neighbours. Inevitably this shift in analytical perspective requires a degree of discussion of how this project relates to established anglophone literary fields. My thesis is engaged both in Romantic- era scholarship and transatlantic studies but within a comparative methodology more familiar in world literary studies, and by its nature a project of this kind must also consider several literary periodizations, such as 3 For this hemispheric and global emphasis within recent Southern Studies, see Richard H. King, ‘Allegories of Imperialism: Globalizing Southern Studies’, American Literary History, 23 (2011), 148-158. Also, Harilaos Stecopoulos, Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898-1976 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008) and Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie, eds., Global Faulkner (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009). 4 On the complexity of the links between the Scottish Enlightenment and ‘modernity’, see Norman Geras and Robert Wokler, eds., Enlightenment and Modernity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 9 the Romantic period, late nineteenth-century American Realism, Modernism and contemporary literature. I will demonstrate the necessity of this approach for rethinking categories
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