Lost in the Backwoods: Scots and the North American Wilderness

How is the Scottish imagination shaped by its emigre experience with wilderness and the extreme? Drawing on journals, emigrant guides, memoirs, letters, poetry and fi ction, this book examines patterns of survival, defeat, adaptation and response in North America’s harshest landscapes. Most Scots who crossed the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries encountered the practical, moral and cultural challenges of the wilderness, with its many tensions and contradictions. Jenni Calder explores the eff ect of these experiences on the Scots imagination.