Writing cross-country: landscapes, palimpsests and the problems of Scottish literary tourism

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this article I reflect on some of the issues raised in representing Scotland’s landscapes while writing a literary travel guide to the country. I begin by analysing the metaphor of the landscape as a palimpsest, consider how various representations of the landscape, contained in literary travel accounts, might add layers to the meanings of places. I discuss issues I faced in discussing Boswell’s and Johnson’s books about their journey to the Hebrides. I then examine Jules Verne’s response to Walter Scott’s descriptions of Loch Lomond in ‘Backwards to Britain’, and suggest how this response offered an opportunity to demonstrate the cultural construction of tourist representations of Loch Lomond. I then situate Louis MacNeice’s Hebridean alienation in ‘I Crossed the Minch’ alongside Kevin MacNeil’s anti-pastoral ’The Stornoway Way’, and conclude by considering how postmodern fiction offers opportunities to complicate standard tourist narratives.