An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Sarah Sharp (Visiting Research Fellow, 2026)
The Contested Cottage: Scottish Literature, Irish Partition and the Cottage Nation.
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've been building on and complicating my previous work on the archetype in the settler world (United States, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa) by turning my attention to a closer neighbour. In the final years of the nineteenth century, amidst a high level of political volatility across the island of Ireland, a new strain of prose writing emerges in Ulster that appears to directly draw on contemporary Scottish literary trends: the Ulster Kailyard. 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 the cottage to in the years before and after Irish partition? 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?
Meeting ID: 384 971 962 716 1
Passcode: nV6Rg79e