Scotland And The Borders Of Romanticism

This page intentionally left blank S C OT L A N D A N D T H E B O R D E R S O F RO M A N T I C I S M Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism is the first published collection of critical essays devoted to Scottish writing between 1745 and 1830 – a key period marking the contested divide between the 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. 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 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 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. S C OT L A N D A N D T H E BORDERS OF RO M A N T I C I S M ed ited by L EITH DAV IS Simon Fraser University IAN DU NCAN University of California, Berkeley JANET SORENSEN Indiana University cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521832830 © Cambridge University Press 2004 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2004 isbn-13 isbn-10 978-0-511-21120-1 eBook (EBL) 0-511-21297-6 eBook (EBL) isbn-13 isbn-10 978-0-521-83283-0 hardback 0-521-83283-7 hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Contents List of contributors Acknowledgments page vii viii Introduction 1 Ian Duncan, with Leith Davis and Jan