Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism

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.

Table of Contents:
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.

About the Author :
Leith Davis is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707-1830 (1998) and numerous articles on topics in Scottish and Irish literature of the eighteenth century and Romantic era. Ian Duncan is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Modern Romance and the Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge, 1992) and numerous articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish literature. He has edited Walter Scott's Rob Roy and Ivanhoe and James Hogg's Winter Evening Tales. Janet Sorensen is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University at Bloomington. She is the author of The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (Cambridge, 2000) and she has written many articles on eighteenth-century topics.

Review :
'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