ABSTRACT
Towards the end of his study of the 'production' of the Scottish Highlands since the mid-eighteenth century, Improvement and Romance, Peter Womack claims that 'the Highlands are imaginary' 1• Peripheralized, defeated, but morally superior, 'the region was committed to the privileges, and condemned to the marginality, of fiction' (pp. 179-80). Using Womack's theorization of the Highland dilemma as a springboard, I want to unpick some of his remarks, to test them against texts from the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the respective claims of 'improvement' and 'romance' were most vigorously contested; and from the late twentieth century, when the very different circumstances, of mass tourism and commodification of travel, can nonetheless be traced back directly to those established during the Enlightenment and exploited in its aftermath. If the mutually sustaining discourses of improvement and romance have not conclusively been superseded as the foremost means of representing matters pertinent to the Highlands, a definite presence of some promising new interventions is however being felt.
