Tales of a Grandmother: Female Literary Agency and Its Echoes in Scotland’s Cultural Memory in the Age of Scott
Sir Walter Scott’s shadow eclipsed most of his contemporary writers in Scotland’s cultural memory of the early nineteenth century. In this talk, we investigate one of these subdued voices of the female writers of Scottish national tales, Christian Isobel Johnstone. Her novel Clan-Albin, published just one year after Waverley, conflates Celtic with Anglican imagery and radically renegotiates the family realm as a basis for the establishment of the cultural memory through the Celtic foster tradition. Drawing from the most influential theories in memory studies, we embark on a journey through the Highlands of the Macalbin clan and analyse the interplay of time, place, and gender in Johnstone’s reimagination of Ossianic mythmaking.
Leonie Jungen is a PhD candidate and PG Visiting Researcher at the University of Glasgow based at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. She holds a PhD scholarship by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and was selected as a Junior Fellow to the Gutenberg Academy Fellows Program in 2025. Her recent publications include articles on Margaret Oliphant and Christian Isobel Johnstone, and she is currently working on a book chapter on the Scottish novella in global perspective.
