St Kilda and the sublime

This paper considers how the search for the sublime in nineteenth-century S cotland found its expression in the voyage to St Kilda, a remote island arc hipelago west of Scotland's Outer Hebrides. It looks at the historical cons truction of St Kilda as an ultima Thule for Victorian travellers, a site wh ich offered an incongruous set of discourses on antiquity and modernity; im provement and romance; evangelicalism and impiety Grounding the early inter est in St Kilda in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory - specifically that of James MacPherson and Edmund Burke - the paper shows how this corporeal a dventure into the Ossianic and oceanic sublime was disrupted by the islande rs' religion and social organization. If the rhetorical strategies of the e arly tourists located St Kilda 'on the edge of the world', I draw attention to how the island was central to the ecclesiastical geography of Scotland. Given that for nineteenth-century Scotland the political life of the churc h eclipsed that of the stare, the use of St Kilda as an emblem of Presbyter ian polity was highly significant. In the context of a modern Scottish nati on searching for historical perspectives on governance and community, the s tory of this 'island republic' has become important in the production of co ntemporary meaning. By challenging the mural-political authority of the tra vellers' accounts, I ascribe a greater degree of agency to the islanders an d thereby question the dominant narrative of SI Kildan history.