The Scots Imagination and Modern Memory - Softcover

Andrew Blaikie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0748617876 ISBN 13: 9780748617876

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2013

Synopsis

This highly original study explores how different, but connected ways of seeing infuse relationships between place and belonging. Its argument is that all memories, whether fleeting glimpses or elaborated narratives, necessarily invoke imagined pasts - tenement life, island cultures, vanished moralities, even the origins of social science. But do these multiple recollections share a common frame of reference? Are perceptions conditioned by a collective social imaginary? Visions of nation and community, from Adam Ferguson's ideas on the development of civil society through John Grierson's pioneering of documentary film to the structures of feeling in popular fiction, reflect the impact of modernity on Scottish culture since the late eighteenth century. While landscape as the symbolic 'face of Scotland' and its attendant mental contours have been produced and debated in many genres, including travel literature, social commentary, novels and magazines, changes in the means of capturing and presenting images, particularly the emergent possibilities of the photograph, have affected the ways we identify and remember. The analysis adopts a broadly sociological approach, but its range lends equal appeal to social historians, cultural geographers, and particularly those pursuing visual or memory studies.

About this title

Review:

A tour de force by Andrew Blaikie, who tells us that the Scots didn't invent the modern world; we only imagined it. And in so doing, we have become creatures of those images. --David McCrone, Edinburgh University

Synopsis:

Collective impressions of family life, childhood, community and later life tend to be constructed through narratives and images. These memories can conflict or harmonize with histories developed from other sources. Andrew Blaikie uses case studies to problematize how we interpret Scotland's recent past, for example asking how travelling journalists such as H.V. Morton constructed a picture of the nation using particular symbols of Scottishness. These are set against the diversity of lived experiences, indicating that personal biographies are often distinctly at odds with collective memories. Yet the continuing prominence of cultural myths suggests people seek to accommodate their personal understanding of everyday experience within a collective sense of community, local, national or otherwise. Perspectives from history, sociology and cultural studies are blended in this exploration of Scottish identity in the 20th century.

About this edition

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0748617876
• ISBN 13: 9780748617876
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272