LEADER 05033nam 2200781Ia 450 001 9910462916403321 005 20200520144314.0 010 $a0-8122-0395-X 024 7 $a10.9783/9780812203950 035 $a(CKB)2670000000418186 035 $a(OCoLC)859160638 035 $a(CaPaEBR)ebrary10748429 035 $a(SSID)ssj0000981341 035 $a(PQKBManifestationID)11505164 035 $a(PQKBTitleCode)TC0000981341 035 $a(PQKBWorkID)10973089 035 $a(PQKB)11633347 035 $a(MiAaPQ)EBC3442062 035 $a(MdBmJHUP)muse27917 035 $a(DE-B1597)449737 035 $a(OCoLC)979627945 035 $a(DE-B1597)9780812203950 035 $a(Au-PeEL)EBL3442062 035 $a(CaPaEBR)ebr10748429 035 $a(CaONFJC)MIL682710 035 $a(EXLCZ)992670000000418186 100 $a20060710d2007 uy 0 101 0 $aeng 135 $aurcn||||||||| 181 $ctxt 182 $cc 183 $acr 200 14$aThe ruins of experience$b[electronic resource] $eScotland's "romantick" Highlands and the birth of the modern witness /$fMatthew Wickman 210 $aPhiladelphia $cUniversity of Pennsylvania Press$dc2007 215 $a1 online resource (269 p.) 300 $aTexts examined include: poems, novels, philosophical texts, travel narratives, contemporary theory, and evidential treatises and trial narratives. 311 $a1-322-51428-3 311 $a0-8122-3971-7 320 $aIncludes bibliographical references (p. [225]-239) and index. 327 $t Frontmatter -- $tContents -- $tPreface: Scottish Highland Romance: A Reappraisal -- $tIntroduction. Experience and the Allure of the Improbable -- $tPart One. Structure -- $tChapter 1. A Musket Shot and Its Echoes -- $tChapter 2. Aftershocks of the Appin Murder -- $tChapter 3. Evidence and Equivalence -- $tChapter 4. Improvement and Apocalypse -- $tPart Two. Feeling -- $tChapter 5. The Compulsions of Immediacy -- $tChapter 6. Of Mourning and Machinery -- $tChapter 7. Highland Romance in Late Modernity -- $tNotes -- $tBibliography -- $tIndex -- $tAcknowledgments 330 $aThere emerged, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, a reflexive relationship between shifting codes of legal evidence in British courtrooms and the growing fascination throughout Europe with the "primitive" Scottish Highlands. New methods for determining evidential truth, linked with the growing prominence of lawyers and a formalized division of labor between witnesses and jurors, combined to devalue the authority of witness testimony, magnifying the rupture between experience and knowledge. Juries now pronounced verdicts based not upon the certainty of direct experience but rather upon abstractions of probability or reasonable likelihood. Yet even as these changes were occurring, the Scottish Highlands and Hebridean Islands were attracting increased attention as a region where witness experience in sublime and communal forms had managed to trump enlightened progress and the probabilistic, abstract, and mediated mentality on which the Enlightenment was predicated. There, in a remote corner of Britain, natives and tourists beheld things that surpassed enlightened understanding; experience was becoming all the more alluring to the extent that it signified something other than knowledge.Matthew Wickman examines this uncanny return of experiential authority at the very moment of its supposed decline and traces the alluring improbability of experience into our own time. Thematic in its focus and cross-disciplinary in its approach, The Ruins of Experience situates the literary next to the nonliterary, the old beside the new. Wickman looks to poems, novels, philosophical texts, travel narratives, contemporary theory, and evidential treatises and trial narratives to suggest an alternative historical view of the paradoxical tensions of the Enlightenment and Romantic eras. 606 $aEnglish literature$xScottish authors$xHistory and criticism 606 $aEvidence (Law) 606 $aExperience in literature 606 $aKnowledge, Theory of 606 $aLiterature$xHistory and criticism 606 $aScottish literature$xHistory and criticism 606 $aSubjectivity in literature 606 $aWitnesses in literature 607 $aHighlands (Scotland)$xIn literature 608 $aElectronic books. 615 0$aEnglish literature$xScottish authors$xHistory and criticism. 615 0$aEvidence (Law) 615 0$aExperience in literature. 615 0$aKnowledge, Theory of. 615 0$aLiterature$xHistory and criticism. 615 0$aScottish literature$xHistory and criticism. 615 0$aSubjectivity in literature. 615 0$aWitnesses in literature. 676 $a820.9/3554 700 $aWickman$b Matthew$01033608 801 0$bMiAaPQ 801 1$bMiAaPQ 801 2$bMiAaPQ 906 $aBOOK 912 $a9910462916403321 996 $aThe ruins of experience$92452246 997 $aUNINA