Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism

This is a 2004 collection of critical essays devoted to Scottish writing between 1745 and 1830.

Leith Davis (Edited by), Ian Duncan (Edited by), Janet Sorensen (Edited by)

9780521832830, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 June 2004

260 pages
23.5 x 16 x 1.9 cm, 0.535 kg

Review of the hardback: '… 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

Originally published in 2004, Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism is a collection of critical essays 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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]