Scottish Travellers, National Character, and Cross-border Storytelling
Scottish Travellers, National Character, and Cross-border Storytelling

Summary/Abstract: During the 1820s and 1830s, British and European images of other cultures were shaped by the increasing mobility of people, from tourists to emigrants, and the transnational circulation of literature, from travel accounts to translations to tales set in foreign locales. These images also drew on an older concept of “national character” – the idea that individuals within a nation share common dispositions and manners. The Scottish writer John Galt, an internationally known novelist with first-hand experience as a traveller in southern Europe and the Levant, was a key contributor to these discourses. Galt revisits Mediterranean locales in his late novel Eben Erskine: The Traveller (1833), bringing readers along on the narrator’s journey of self-discovery as he encounters Spaniards, Sicilians, Germans, Bohemians, Greeks, Turks, and an Indian storyteller and comes to know his own character through his impulsive – but often mistaken – responses to them and the stories they tell. Eben Erskine combines travel narrative with a Scottish Bildungsroman, reflecting on Enlightenment theories of national character in light of eyewitness observation of individuals and societal institutions. With its paradoxical juxtaposition of cultural stereotypes with openness to other voices, Galt’s novel shows how popular fiction shaped and reflected cross-cultural attitudes in late Romanticism.

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