Narrating Alternative Nations: Oral Tradition and Counter-Hegemonic Nationalism in Scottish and Anglo-Irish Fiction, 1800-1818

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Romantic-era fiction in Scotland and Ireland reimagines oral tradition as a literary and political form through which alternative models of nationhood are negotiated under the conditions of the Union. Focusing on Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), and Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) and The Heart of Midlothian (1818), it argues that representations of oral storytelling operate not as nostalgic survivals of premodern culture but as formal strategies that mediate relations between vernacular voice and imperial authority. The dissertation identifies four modes of preservation—structural resistance, sentimental mediation, aesthetic containment, and institutional incorporation—to describe how these texts transform oral forms such as digression, recursion, and vernacular idiom into narrative techniques that both challenge and adapt to modern print culture.