So begins a recent account of the event now remembered as the Appin Murder. The delectation with which the narrator paints the scene (e.g., the “gaps in birch and conifer”) testifies to the seductive material on which he reports. The murder and ensuing Trial of James Stewart were sensations in their era and continue to arouse interest for reasons ranging from the mysterious identity of the assassin and the odor of injustice clinging to the court proceedings to the benchmark the trial represents in the social transformation of the Highlands. The murder both resulted from and eventually motivated schemes of...

“Experience has fallen in value,” Walter Benjamin lamented in his 1936 essay “The Storyteller,” perhaps modernity’s most famous jeremiad on the decay of experience.

And it looks as if it may fall into bottomlessness.... Wasn’t it noticeable at the end of the [First World W]ar that men who returned from the battlefield had grown silent—not richer but poorer in communicable experience?... And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been more thoroughly belied than strategic experience was belied by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power....

One of the more compelling ironies associated with the Stewart Trial is that ultimately the greatest denunciation of feudal Highland society was articulated in the feudal Highlander’s own defense. In the closing hours of a trial which ran for over two consecutive days without recess, George Brown, Stewart’s defense counsel, argued cunningly that the pursuers’ circumstantial narrative actually extended the domain of clan fealty, bringing it uncomfortably within the realm of law and the intimacy of the everyday in “civilized” Britain. Evidence of this nature, reducible to witness testimony in contrast to the enlightened ideal of probability, leveled the accusers...

Like so many other treatises on improvement, The Wealth of Nations registered the peculiarity of Highland society and geography as a problem. Combined with the relative aridity of the soil, these points of difference made it difficult to blanket the region in a system of rational equivalencies. Hence, Smith argued,

[t]here are some sorts of industry, even of the lowest kind, which can be carried on no where but in a great town . . . . In the lone houses and very small villages which are scattered about in so desert a country as the Highlands of Scotland, every...

Their stories are strikingly similar in some key respects. Each felt drawn toward a historical catastrophe by whose ghosts he felt haunted. Each labored diligently and in relative obscurity in piecing together the fragments of this past. From these fragments, each cobbled together a mosaic of images which he declared was intended for him alone and perhaps for those closest to him. Each had the good or ill fortune to come into contact with people of social influence at a time when these narrative mosaics might find a wide and voracious audience. Each professed reticence at the thought of publishing...

Raymond Williams persuasively, if somewhat fancifully, argues that the modern concept of literature emerged as compensation for “the socially repressive and intellectually mechanical forms of a new social order: that of capitalism, and especially industrial capitalism.”¹ By this logic, the “romantick” Highlands of the late eighteenth century foreshadowed the modern conceptual space of literature in their popular differentiation from “the socially repressive and intellectually mechanical” schemes of progress imported into the region by the improvers. From this perspective, Highland romance originated as a nostalgic image of the receding past, compensating as “literature” and “culture” for what was irretrievably lost with...

Amid a larger discussion of the virtual death of the humanities in the Information Age, Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool resets the narrative of the decay and redemption of experience. Not that Liu sees it exactly in this way: he imagines, rather, a story about the decay of this redemptive possibility. It was not always thus, he recognizes. A notion of experiential reality accompanied emergent ethnic and class identities during the industrial era. Consistent with the dynamics of Mac-an-t-Saoir’s complex elegies, individuals within these ethnic- and class-based communities drew strength from their identification as “part of a ‘people’ or...