Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism

Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism is the first book devoted to Scottish writing between 1745 and 1830 - a key period marking the contested divide between Scottish Enlightenment and Romanticism in British literary history. Essays in the volume, by leading scholars from Scotland, England, Canada and the USA, address a range of major figures and topics, among them Hume and the Romantic imagination, Burns’s poetry, the Scottish song and ballad revivals, gender and national tradition, the prose fiction of Walter Scott and James Hogg, the national theatre of Joanna Baillie, the Romantic varieties of historicism and antiquarianism, Romantic Orientalism, and Scotland as a site of English cultural fantasies. The essays undertake a collective rethinking of the national and period categories that have structured British literary history, by examining the relations between the concepts of Enlightenment and Romanticism as well as between Scottish and English writing.

• Covers a wide range of writers including David Hume, Adam Smith, Robert Burns, Joanna Baillie and Walter Scott • Focuses on the importance of Scotland in the development of British Romanticism • Sheds new light on the national and period categories that have structured British literary history

Introduction Ian Duncan, with Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen; 1. Coleridge, Hume, and the chains of the Romantic imagination Cairns Craig; 2. The pathos of abstraction: Adam Smith, Ossian, and Samuel Johnson Ian Duncan; 3. Antiquarianism, the Scottish science of man, and the emergence of modern disciplinarity Susan Manning; 4. Melancholy, memory and the ‘Narrative Situation’ of history in post-enlightenment Scotland Ina Ferris; 5. Scott, the Scottish enlightenment and Romantic orientalism James Watt; 6. Walter Scott’s Romantic postmodernity Jerome McGann; 7. Putting down the rising John Barrell; 8. Joanna Baillie Stages the Nation Alyson Bardsley; 9. William Wordsworth and William Cobbett: Scotch travel and British reform Peter Manning; 10. Burns’s topographies Penny Fielding; 11. At ‘Sang About’: Scottish song and the challenge to British culture Leith Davis; 12. Romantic spinstrelsy: Anne Bannerman and the sexual politics of the Ballad Adriana Craciun; 13. ‘The Fause Nourice Song’: childhood, child murder, and the formalism of the Scottish ballad revival Ann Wierda Rowland.

\'Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism counters the grand and crude essentialist narratives propagated by Smith and Muir with a particularity of detail that rehabilitates not only Scotland as a place of Romantic recognition as mature as England, but also the much maligned Scottish Enlightenment.\' Gerard Carruthers University of Glasgow, Review of Scottish Culture

\'… ground-breaking … manages simultaneously to be wide-ranging and in firm control of its overall argument. The volume has not only surveyed the ground: it has issued a challenge.\' Studies in Hogg and his World