Dear Dr. _____,
I only have one relevant article that I could find available from Murray Pittock. You will recall from his The Myth of the Jacobite Clans that he is very critical of the prominence of the Highlander in the 1745 revolt. However, much of his other scholarship focuses on Enlightenment and Romanticized perceptions of Scotland and modern Scotland in a global setting. If he is criticizing a common Romantic myth, I agree, but find it somewhat of a straw-man argument. Alan MacInnes has done an excellent job at showing the integral nature of the northern Scottish Highlander in the revolt as an eighteenth-century phenomenon (without resorting to Romantic sources). I get the feeling that Pittock is not really familiar with the scholarly debates on Jacobitism and often misses the mark completely. For instance, he slips in the below article (1990) and refers to the Stuarts as absolutists, when Bruce Lenman had already established quite firmly as early as the 1970s that Jacobites and Stuarts alike were more after the idea of hereditary succession than absolutism. French aid might have been absolutist, but from the perspective British Jacobitism or even Charles I's reign, absolutism is a very difficult position to hold.
Wesley
Notes on The Poetry of Lionel Johnson by Murray Pittock in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 28, No. ¾, The Nineties (Autumn – Winter, 1990).
This article is literary criticism. In it, Pittock ties Johnson's nostalgia and love of the artist with a mythological perception of Charles I. Celtic features as a mythic and perfect past, where artistry remains immortal, and Charles I is not only an encourager of art, but dies in order to validate his own sublimity, or claim to artistry. Like the rest of Johnson's themes, Charles I triumphs in death to legitimize his life. (However, I can personally say that there are major, major points of historical difference between Johnson and the original 17th century defense of Charles I in Eikon Basilike.) The only other real relevant point of interest to me was Pittock's tying Johnson's star mythology to the poet Ben Jonson (a source which may be valuable to me).
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