Benedict Anderson has persuaded us that all nations are imagined communities, but Scotland, perhaps more than some others, is a nation of the imagination. Ever since James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian, supposedly translated from the works of a third-century Celtic bard, sent the skeptical Samuel Johnson on a journey to the Highlands and Islands to search out the original sources, cultural critics have been bent on discovering the “real” Scotland and differentiating it from false representations. The modernist poet Edwin Muir, who hailed from Orkney, bitterly referred to Robert Burns and Walter Scott, the giants of Scottish literature, as “Sham bards of a sham nation,” suggesting that their romanticized representations of Scotland had fostered a nostalgia for a nation that never existed and prevented cultural and economic growth. More recently Diana Gabaldon’s immensely popular Outlander series, in which characters from the early twentieth century are transported back to mid-eighteenth-century Scotland, has sent tourists in Samuel Johnson’s footsteps as they seek to discover a country that Gabaldon, by her own admission, had never visited until after the first of the Outlander books was published.

The four papers on this on panel trace the trajectory from Ossian to Outlander, examining the discourses that, over time, have informed the creation of “fake” Scotlands. I received seven remarkably strong proposals for the panel, from which I selected four. Although a four-member panel means that each speaker’s paper must run no more than 13 minutes, the connections between King’s and Schmidt’s proposals, and between McCracken-Flesher’s and Winter’s, were too compelling for me not to include all four.

Rachel Scarborough King’s “Fake Histories: Scots, Americans, and Stadial Theory” examines the comparison that eighteenth-century writers frequently made between Scottish Highlanders and Native Americans as similarly “primitive” peoples. This comparison not only informed Macpherson’s Ossian poems, but also provided a philosophical justification for the colonial subjugation of both peoples. King argues that false representations of Scottish Highlanders had consequences for the direction of American colonialism and British attempts to “improve” Scottish lands and people.

Caroline McCracken-Flesher examines Walter Scott’s role in the manufacture of fake Scotlands. Scott famously built himself an imitation Gothic Castle, Abbotsford, from the proceeds of his immensely popular Waverley novels, which offered readers romanticized representations of a Scotland full of kilted heroes, sublime landscapes, and quirky peasants. While Scott’s work and life, and any intentions he may have had about Abbotsford, have faded from popular memory, Abbotsford today offers modes of cultural encounter that are purveyed through National Trust properties and twenty-first-century experiential tourism. Reading today’s encounters with Abbotsford through Dean MacCannell’s understanding of the touristic gaze, McCracken-Flesher suggests that we might consider the tourist, who expects authenticity, perversely to be the phenomenon by which Abbotsford is produced as authentic.

Caroline Winter’s paper traces a direct lineage from the Gothic historical fiction popularized by Scott to Gabaldon’s Outlander series. This lineage, which includes Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (1810), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series (1996–), invokes “the North” is a site of the sublime and of supernatural possibility. In Outlander, the fictional site of the standing stones of Craig Na Duhn is a nexus of history and supernatural possibility, the gateway through which the protagonist Claire journeys “North” in a metaphorical sense: back in time to a place of historical and cultural otherness, a counterpoint to the grim reality of post-war England that she and Frank have tried to escape. Although the Outlander novels tends to be read as science fiction, Winter demonstrates that its construction of Scotland relies on standard Gothic tropes.

Finally, Andrea Schmidt’s paper examines Outlander’s uncomfortable relationship to the rise of right-wing populist movements in the US. While acknowledging that the television series, which airs on Starz, attempts to improve on the novels’ racism and misogyny, Schmidt argues that it nonetheless engages in a neoliberal erasure of identity—for instance through its Scottish hero Jamie’s equation of Highlanders’ struggles for self-determination cots with those of American indigenous peoples. Schmidt’s paper thus brings the panel full circle back to King’s examination of eighteenth-century conflations of Highlanders and Native Americans and highlights the problematic political implications of Outlander’s representations of Scotland.

The Scottish literature forum takes seriously the forum review committee’s recent recommendations that we increase our presence at the MLA conference by proposing panels beyond our guaranteed session and that we seek to diversify our forum’s membership. “Fake Scotlands” brings together senior and junior scholars, literary history and popular culture, and Romantic-era and contemporary texts. It aims to draw on the popularity of Outlander to make Scottish Studies accessible to a broad audience while also providing substance for specialists in Scottish Romanticism—a group that historically has comprised the bulk of the forum’s membership. By bringing junior scholars onto our panels, we hope to encourage their longer term interest in the forum.