Research

In Foreign Soil: Death Abroad in Scottish Literature and Travel Narratives 1790-1900

Image: ‘The Emigrants’ by William Allsworth, 1844. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Dr Sarah Sharp (UCD)

‘In Foreign Soil: Death Abroad in Scottish Literature and Travel Writing 1790-1900’ looks at Scottish representations of death abroad between 1790 and 1900. During the Romantic (1782-1832) and Victorian (1832-1901) periods Scots played a disproportionate part in Britain’s rapidly expanding empire and growing sphere of economic activity abroad. Many of them found themselves burying friends, colleagues and loved ones far from Scotland and home. My research examines how these experiences are reflected in nineteenth-century Scottish writing, and explores how descriptions of death abroad articulate ideas of nation and identity. Combining literary and non-literary sources, it places fictional death scenes in dialogue with biographical accounts taken from travel and settler narratives to assemble the first book length study of Scots’ cultural attitudes to death abroad in the age of Empires.

Publications and Presentations:

• Sharp, Sarah, ‘A Death in the Cottage: Spiritual and Economic Improvement in Romantic-era Scottish Death Narratives’, in Cultures of Improvement in Scottish Literature, ed. Alex Benchimol and Gerard McKeever (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), 213-33.
• Sharp, Sarah, ‘A Place to Mourn?: Emotion, Genre and Child Death in the ‘Lady Egidia’ Shipboard Diaries’, Victorians 133 (2018): 30-43.
• Sharp, Sarah, ‘Exporting “The Cotter’s Saturday Night”: Robert Burns, Scottish Romantic Nationalism and Colonial Settler Identity’, Romanticism 25.1 (2019): 81-89.
• Sharp, Sarah, ‘“Your vocation is marriage’’: Systematic Colonisation, The Marriage Plot and Finding Home in Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison (1854)’, Scottish Literary Review 11.1 (2019): 27-45.