Crossing the Highland Line

The eighteenth century was a time of dramatic change and drastic upheaval in Scotland, from the Treaty of Union with England in 1707, through Jacobite rebellions in the Highlands, to the Scottish Enlightenment. This was the century when Scottish writing exploded across the globe, from Hume and Smith, from Macpherson's Ossian, from Burns and from Scott, transforming world literature and culture. Crossing the Highland Line is a new collection of essays examining this crucial period, exploring the literary connections and influences across Scotland, and tracing the links between those who wrote in Scots and English and those who wrote in Gaelic. These essays, from fourteen leading scholars, show that the whole of Scotland - Highland and Lowland, high cultures and low - participated in the reshaping of literature in the eighteenth century. The Highland Line does not divide.

Christopher MacLachlan is an editor whose work includes literary classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes/The Amateur Emigrant and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk.