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Introduction Introduction Ian Duncan his issue of Modern Language Quarterly, devoted to Scottish writing Tin the Romantic period, joins a surge of recent work on the topic. Monographs and essay collections produced just in the last three years include David Duff and Catherine Jones’s Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic (2007), my Scott’s Shadow (2007), Evan Gottlieb’s Feel- ing British (2007), Andrew Lincoln’s Walter Scott and Modernity (2007), Kenneth McNeil’s Scotland, Britain, Empire (2007), Matthew Wickman’s Ruins of Experience (2007), Penny Fielding’s Scotland and the Fictions of Geography (2008), Murray Pittock’s Scottish and Irish Romanticism (2008), Nigel Leask’s Scottish Pastoral (forthcoming), and Barton Swaim’s Scottish Men of Letters and the New Public Sphere, 1802 – 1834 (2009) — and there may be more. Research in the field has drawn on the ongoing scholarly editions of Walter Scott and James Hogg from Edinburgh University Press, while a collected works of Robert Burns is due to appear from Oxford University Press. These last few years have also seen the pub- lication of new general histories of Scottish literature, including the three-volume Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature (2007) and Robert Crawford’s Scotland’s Books (2009). Scottish writing in the period plays a crucial role in recent genre-based studies such as Jason Marc Har- ris’s study of nineteenth-century folklore (2008), Steve Newman’s and Maureen N. McLane’s books on the ballad revival (2007, 2008), and Richard Maxwell’s book on the historical novel (2009). The current interest in Scotland (and Ireland) marks a long-over- due correction of the bias of scholarship in British Romanticism. The headnote for the Cambridge University Press series Cambridge Studies Modern Language Quarterly 70:4 (December 2009) DOI 10.1215/00267929-2009-009 © 2009 by University of Washington Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/modern-language-quarterly/article-pdf/70/4/403/442567/MLQ704_01_Intro.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 404 MLQ December 2009 in Romanticism, the vehicle for much of the best work in the field over the past fifteen years, may be taken as symptomatic: From the early 1780s to the early 1830s a formidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition. The relations between science, philosophy, religion and literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender relations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism by Cobbett and Hazlitt; poetic form, content and style by the Lake School and the Cockney School. We see only the southern hemisphere of a greater British phenomenon. As I argue elsewhere (in the introduction to Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen’s edited work Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism [2004]), Scotland does not fit the periodization of English Romanti- cism (even when stretched back to the early 1780s); it makes more sense to consider a Scottish Enlightenment-Romantic century, without clear ideological-aesthetic boundaries between the work designated by these terms until after 1815. Scottish Enlightenment projects of moral senti- ment, history, and the “science of man”; James Macpherson’s “Ossian” poems; collections of ancient and popular minstrelsy (discussed in Sorensen’s contribution to this issue); the vernacular poetic revival crowned by Burns; the Scottish periodical industry led by the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine; the national and historical fiction of Scott, Hogg, and John Galt: these constitute an archive no less rich or consequential than the canon sketched above. By no means all the new work on Scottish and Irish writing concep- tualizes itself in relation to a phenomenon called Romanticism. Much of it dissolves that contested term, by geographic and historical dilu- tion, into the ostensibly neutral category of a North Atlantic long eigh- teenth or long nineteenth century. Among the recent book-length stud- ies, Pittock’s Scottish and Irish Romanticism makes the most concerted attempt to reclaim Romanticism as a project, a cultural politics, within the expanded field of an archipelagic or four-nations historiography. Pittock redefines Romanticism as Romantic nationalism, yielding, in the Scottish case, a literature of covert rather than open resistance to the official culture of Anglo-British assimilation that followed the 1707 Act of Union. His analysis casts revelatory light on whole traditions and movements (not just individual authors) left unaccounted for in Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/modern-language-quarterly/article-pdf/70/4/403/442567/MLQ704_01_Intro.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 Duncan Introduction 405 the current historiography of British literature, notably the great suc- cession of eighteenth-century poetry in Scots that runs through Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, and Burns (whom Pittock makes the key figure in his argument). The weight and quality of this attention to poetry are the more welcome given the field’s recent tendency to focus on the novel, following the still-authoritative cue of Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism (1997). Nevertheless, Pittock’s nationalist recoding of Romanticism throws up anomalies, the most striking of which are the Scottish Enlighten- ment and Scott. The former is cast as Romanticism’s antithesis, while the latter is admitted to the field by way of a drastic detour: Scott’s fictions become truly Romantic once they emigrate from their Scot- tish and British origins to a reception among the continental Euro- pean nationalisms. These cases, Scott and the Scottish Enlightenment, reiterate the problem of an ideological definition of Romanticism that accepts as authentic certain authors and projects in the period, but not others. Fielding’s Scotland and the Fictions of Geography, in contrast, discovers a Scottish Romanticism inextricably entwined with Enlighten- ment historicism, mobilizing the deconstructive energies latent in the claim of a universal scheme or system to account for the singularities of place and case. Pittock brings Scotland as well as Ireland (the more evidently colonial and thus contentious case) within the orbit of what Pascale Casanova (in The World Republic of Letters [2004], 77) dubs “the Herder effect,” the tidal wave of European nationalist reactions to a French- based imperial Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, which constituted the second historical stage of the formation of “world literary space” at the end of the eighteenth century. Casanova’s argument may help us frame a different understanding of the situation of Scottish literature in rela- tion both to the Enlightenment republic of letters, with its center in Paris, and to a Herderian Romanticism of European national cultures, even though Casanova barely mentions Scotland. Indeed, in its conspic- uous lack of fit, the Scottish case necessitates a revision of her thesis. Scotland’s eighteenth-century project of cultural modernization — the Scottish Enlightenment — was made possible by the establishment of “a separate public sphere” (Pittock’s phrase [13]) of letters and sci- ence in the Lowland university towns, one of the conditions for which Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/modern-language-quarterly/article-pdf/70/4/403/442567/MLQ704_01_Intro.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 406 MLQ December 2009 was distance from the seat of government following the Act of Union. This provided the institutional platform not only for distinctively national cultural formations (religion, law, education) but also for Scot- land’s entry into world literary space, even as Anglo-British assimilation provided that entry with ideological cover. At the same time that the Scottish literati harnessed English as the linguistic vehicle of Enlight- enment, they sought to integrate their philosophical projects with the European republic of letters, of which Paris was the capital. If the Scots invented English literature, in Crawford’s influential formulation (1998), they did so to annex it to that French-based horizon of world literary space over and against a London that remained, in literary and philosophical terms, secondary if not provincial. In short, rather than reiterate a binary antagonism between core and periphery (the restric- tive theme of the second part of Casanova’s study), Scottish literature made itself modern by triangulating itself between the rival centers of London and Paris. A conceptual geography of world literary space casts Scott in a more interesting role than that of enemy of Romantic nationalism or impresario of an Anglo-British aesthetic colonialism. Certainly, Scott’s works, as many critics have recognized, did not promote a separatist Scottish national destiny according to the Herderian model. Yet they attempted something else besides the absorption of Scottish literature into a greater British literature: Scott’s fiction (so far faithful to the Enlightenment) continued to integrate Scottish literature into the still larger domain of European literature, “the world republic of let- ters,” even as his later work would undertake a critical analysis of that domain — not only in the novels that take on early modern French his- tory (Quentin Durward, Anne of Geierstein) or a British imperial horizon (Guy Mannering, The Talisman, The Surgeon’s Daughter) but also in the weird and wonderful late romance Count Robert of Paris, which projects strange mutations of the Enlightenment world-city and its philosophical project, the “science of man,” onto the screen
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