The Scots Imagination and Modern Memory

What are the connections between the representations of people, places, and the past in Scottish visual culture? Visions of nation and community between the late-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries reflect the impact of modernity on the Scottish social imaginary. While the symbolic "face of Scotland" and its attendant mental landscapes have been produced and debated in many genres, changes in the popular means of capturing and presenting images, particularly the emergent technology of the photograph, have affected the ways Scots remember their history. This highly original, interdisciplinary study explores how different kinds of seeing infuse accounts of belonging—narratives that invoke imagined pasts, such as tenement life, island cultures, vanished moralities, even the origins of social science.