The map of the United States is peppered with Scottish place-names and America's telephone directories are filled with surnames illustrating Scottish ancestry. Increasingly, Americans of Scottish extraction are visiting Scotland in search of their family history.

How the American wilderness shaped Scottish experience, imagination and identity. How is the Scottish imagination shaped by its émigré experience with wilderness and the extreme? Drawing on journals, emigrant guides, memoirs, letters, poetry and fiction, 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 effect of these experiences on the Scots imagination. Associated with displacement and disappearance, the 'wilderness' was also a source of adventure and redemption, of exploitation and spiritual regeneration, of freedom and restriction. An arena of greed, cruelty and cannibalism, of courage, generosity and mutual understanding, it brought out the best and the worst of humanity. Did the Scots who emigrated exchange one extreme for another, or did they discover a new idea of identity, freedom and landscape?

Eleanor Dickinson escapes Scotland and the inevitability of the direction of her life to the Eastern strangeness of China. In leaving behind the physical closeness of her relationships with her partner, parents, brother and family she is able to analyse and confront 'the mush of dissatisfaction' that had been expanding to fill her life.

This is a biography, of sorts, and a description of the all-consuming search for that elusive concept known as 'identity'

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Traces the colorful life and wide-ranging work of the Scotish writer in their social context, providing a fresh, unsentimental assessment of his literary achievements and eccentric, Bohemian lifestyle after his forced exile

Combines social history and film criticism in an exploration of the actual American West and the fictional and mythic view of it presented in film Westerns, and of the Western's cultural and political implications and influences