Secrecy, Surveillance and Counterintelligence in the Prose Fiction of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson

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Abstract My PhD examines how Scott and Stevenson use domestic and social forms of secrecy to engage in Scottish historicism. I demonstrate that domestic secrecy is used to explore contemporary issues of heritage, culture and identity within the nineteenth-century Scottish historical novel. I trace the role of secrecy within the authors' prose fiction between 1814 and 1894 to highlight its nuanced relationship with the changing landscape of Scottish historicism throughout the century. By uniting the studies of nineteenth-century Scottish historicism with the sociology of secrecy, I offer a new academic perspective to reassess the relationship between Scott and Stevenson. Research Questions What are the different forms of secrecy portrayed by Scott and Stevenson? How does reading Scott and Stevenson together illustrate changes to the historical genre in the nineteenth century? What is the relationship between domestic and historical secrecy? How does examining history through the lens of domestic secrecy reveal changes in nineteenth-century Scottish historicism? Rationale, Methods and Sources The prose fiction of Scott and Stevenson is full of secret activities: from elopement to piracy, masquerade and murder. It reflects the nineteenth-century fascination with secrecy which fostered the development of gothic fiction, social critique novels, sensation fiction and, ultimately, the detective genre. My thesis explores how domestic and social secrecy is used by Scott and Stevenson to engage in Scottish historicism (understanding history and its composition). This approach traces a specific, coherent path for secrecy within the historical novel between 1814 and 1894. Beginning with Georg Simmel's 'The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies' (1906), I use sociology to trace how secrecy, as a state of conscious suppression, constantly bridges the individual and social. I apply this to scenes, characters and narrative modes to demonstrate the interrelation of personal secrets with social structures. By choosing two writers who developed the historical novel, I show how their differing forms of historicism demonstrate social and generic change in the nineteenth century. I adopt an intertextual method to facilitate a thematic, rather than chronological, delineation of the texts. Scott's historical novels are often used as the genre's archetype. My approach removes this bias and accurately maps the relationship between secrecy and nineteenth-century Scottish historicism. By thematically pairing Scott and Stevenson novels, each chapter focuses on a specific type of secrecy: financial, familial, judicial, bodily and historic.