The TV series has had the biggest onscreen impact on Scotland’s international image since Braveheart (1995), although Highlander (1986), the time-travelling adventure starring Sean Connery, perhaps offers a closer cultural comparison for the men-in-kilts phenomenon. Scots looking to learn about their own history often turn to fiction because the education system has traditionally been weighted towards British subjects, and Outlander has certainly given them food for thought, as well as bringing their history to millions across the globe. Rumour has it that its UK release was delayed lest it influence the Scottish Independence Referendum held the following month. The eighth instalment, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, appeared in June 2014, and the TV adaptation premiered in August that year. Since the first novel launched in 1991, Outlander has ignited global interest in Scottish history, culture, and language. So it’s all Claire’s fault that there’s time-travel in these stories.” It was Gabaldon’s female protagonist who turned it into a time-travelling tale: “When I realized (on the third day of writing) that the Englishwoman I had just dropped into a cottage full of Scotsmen (in kilts) to see what she’d do, was not doing what I expected, at all, I fought with her for a short time, trying to beat her into shape and make her speak like an 18th-century woman, but she just kept making smart-ass modern remarks-and she also took over the story, and started telling it herself. I was writing out of my own muscle, blood, bone and memory, while shaping the things that came through with imagination.” “I also had access to the whole interlibrary loan system and concluded logically that it would be easier to look things up than to make them up, and if I turned out to have no imagination, I could steal things from the historical record.” What began as practice became an epic project and grew wings: “I discovered what the books were about while writing them. She was a university professor at the time, and the idea inspired her to try her hand at writing historical fiction. Outlander began to take root when Gabaldon saw an episode of Dr Who from 1966, featuring a Jacobite in a kilt in the aftermath of Culloden. Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series features Englishwoman Claire Randall, an outlander twice over as a “sassenach” (Saxon) in 1940s Britain who finds herself in 18th-century Scotland in a time of turmoil, and later crosses the Atlantic with her new Highlander husband, Jamie Fraser. Florio’s Tuscan father had landed in London in 1550, fleeing the Inquisition, so his son knew what it meant to be an outlander. The word “outlander” made its first appearance in 1598 in John Florio’s pioneering Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes, where “pellegrino” was glossed as “a stranger, an alien, an outlander, an outlandish man”. Outlandish History: The World-Changing Fiction of Diana Gabaldon
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