The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing

This study examines the complex role of language as an instrument of empire in eighteenth-century British literature. Focusing in particular on the relationship between England and one of its ‘celtic colonies’, Scotland, Janet Sorensen explores the tensions which arose during a period when the formation of a national standard English coincided with the need to negotiate ever widening imperial linguistic contacts. Close readings of poems, novels, dictionaries, grammars and records of colonial English instruction reveal the deeply conflicting relationship between British national and imperial ideologies. Moving from Scots Gaelic poet Alexander MacDonald to writers such as Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and Tobias Smollett, Sorensen analyses British linguistic practices of imperial domination, including the enforcement of English language usage. The book also engages with the work of Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen to offer a wider understanding of the ambivalent nature of English linguistic identity.

• Builds on recent studies in nationalism, colonial discourse and post-colonial theory through close analysis of language in eighteenth-century British literature • Contributes to studies in Scottish literature and culture • Broad appeal: Eighteenth-century literature and language, Anglo-Scottish studies and the theoretical study of cultural nationalism

Introduction; 1. Scripting identity?: English language and literacy instruction in the Highlands and the strange case of Alexander MacDonald; 2. ‘A grammarians regard to the genius of our tongue’: Johnson’s Dictionary, imperial grammar and the customary national language; 3. Women, Celts and hollow voices: Tobias Smollett’s brokering of Anglo-British linguistic identities; 4. The figure of the nation: polite language and its originary other in Adam Smith’s and Hugh Blair’s Lectures in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres; 5. ‘A translator without originals’: William Shaw’s Scots Gaelic and the dialectic of (linguistic) empire; Epilogue: Jane Austen’s language and the strangeness at home in the center.