Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism

by Edited by Leith Davis , Ian Duncan , Janet Sorensen

• ISBN13: 9780521180764
• ISBN10: 0521180767
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-02-17
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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

Coleridge, Hume, and the chains of the Romantic imagination

The pathos of abstraction: Adam Smith, Ossian, and Samuel Johnson

Antiquarianism, the Scottish science of man, and the emergence of modern disciplinarity

Melancholy, memory and the 'Narrative Situation' of history in post-enlightenment Scotland

Scott, the Scottish enlightenment and Romantic orientalism

Walter Scott's Romantic postmodernity

Putting down the rising

Joanna Baillie Stages the Nation

William Wordsworth and William Cobbett: Scotch travel and British reform

Burns's topographies

At 'Sang About': Scottish song and the challenge to British culture

Romantic spinstrelsy: Anne Bannerman and the sexual politics of the Ballad

'The Fause Nourice Song': childhood, child murder, and the formalism of the Scottish ballad revival

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