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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 , Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic (2007), my Scott’s Shadow (2007), Evan Gottlieb’s Feel- ing British (2007), Andrew Lincoln’s and (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 (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 from University Press, while a collected works of is due to appear from Oxford University Press. These last few years have also seen the pub- lication of new general histories of Scottish , including the three-volume Edinburgh History of (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 (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

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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 a formidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition. . . . The relations between , philosophy, religion and literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender relations in A Vindication of the of Woman and ; 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”; ’s “” 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 and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine; the national and 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 , 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

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the current historiography of , notably the great suc- cession of eighteenth-century in Scots that runs through , , 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 . 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 , 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

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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 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 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 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 of late-eleventh-century Constantinople. Scott’s project of integration succeeded spectacularly, in part thanks to a phenomenon mentioned by Casanova and discussed in detail in two (by Paul Barnaby and Maxwell) in Pittock’s edited volume on Scott’s European reception. As French remained the inter-

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national literary language throughout the nineteenth century (the Herder effect notwithstanding), the massive diffusion of Scott’s novels throughout the non-English-reading world took place largely through French translations of them by Auguste-Jean-Baptiste Defauconpret. Continental authors who adapted Scott’s example, such as Aleksandr Pushkin and , read him in Defauconpret’s ver- sions, which also provided the texts for translations into other national . Nor was Scott’s own part in this process passive or merely contingent. His work’s powerful engagement with European literary traditions undoubtedly assisted its French-mediated reception across world literary space. As Maxwell argues in The Historical Novel in Europe, the main tradition of the European historical novel unfolded along a Franco-Scottish axis, from Madame de Lafayette and Antoine-François Prévost through Scott to Victor Hugo and père. Scott, in short, belonged to , and thence to “the world republic of letters,” quite as much as he did to the Scottish and British traditions.

I make these remarks to remind myself (as much as anyone else) of the pressure of linguistic domains outside English in the formation of something identifiable as a Scottish literature. Recent scholarship, from Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism, Davis’s Acts of Union (1998), Sorensen’s Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (2000), and Susan Manning’s Fragments of Union (2002) to the books by Gottlieb, McNeil, and Fielding, has focused on the globalizing circuits of English in the period and on Scottish literature’s critical production of the categories of history and nationality through its supplementary relation to a larger British or North Atlantic literary field. This inquiry has been especially successful in “reopening the case of Scott” ( James Chandler’s phrase in in 1819 [1998], chap. 5), which is taken up in three of the four essays in the present issue of MLQ. These essays are as impressive for their differences in topic, approach, and style as for the quality of their consideration of a major body of work. Showing us how much can still be learned from an alert study of the contexts of Scott’s first novel, Michael Gamer tracks the intricate choreography of self-positioning with which the Author of Waverley entered the field in 1814 — pretending that he had already entered it

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in 1805 and allusively backing himself with a selective tradition of Brit- ish fiction sixty years since: not only Henry Fielding but also the more surprising example of the object narrative (Charles Johnston’s Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea and its ilk). This essay should be read in conjunction with Gamer’s fascinating discussion of early-nineteenth- century British novel collections in the volume edited by Jillian Heydt- Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman, Recognizing the Romantic Novel (2008). The essay by Ina Ferris complicates the standard account of Scott’s historicism, according to which the dialectical commitment to a “Whig” history of inevitable modernization and its “Tory” by-product, a national past steeped in elegy and nostalgia, secures a stable post- Napoleonic present. Ferris shows how the series Tales of My Landlord (1816 – 19) is preoccupied with the phenomenology of the “remnant,” a mode of temporal disconnection and persistence that hollows out the present, rendering it insubstantial, ghostly. Suggestive for the larger topic of Romantic historicism, Ferris’s essay contains the most compel- ling discussions of The Bride of Lammermoor a nd Old Mortality that I can remember reading. Samuel Baker’s essay explores a neglected topic, the ethical formation of Scott’s writing through the legacy of Stoicism in eighteenth-century literature and moral philosophy. Baker shows how influential attempts to square Stoicism with sentimentalism (from Joseph Addison’s Cato to ’s of Moral Sentiments) gen- erated an ethical field for the representation of character — including the author’s persona as well as his fictional characters — through which Scott forged his distinctive mode of Romantic irony. (Both Baker and Gamer elect , who also makes an appearance in Ferris’s essay, as a Romantic-period critical touchstone for reading Scott.) Sorensen’s essay investigates that quintessentially Herderian late Enlightenment project, the literary collection of popular poetry and song. Scott’s first success,Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, was a major contri- bution to the genre, and one that reiterated the antiquarian-nationalist strategy described by Sorensen. Denying the people’s “coevalness” ( Johannes Fabian’s formulation in Time and the Other [1983], chap. 2), Scott buries them in the past under a formidable scholarly apparatus and (in the essay on popular poetry that he added as an appendix to the 1830 edition) develops Bishop Percy’s thesis that the ballads were composed for aristocratic households before their degradation via oral

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transmission and popular reception. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, one of the great neglected works of British Romanticism, has its own com- plexities, which are explored in the new books by Fielding and McLane. Sorensen turns, however, to the eighteenth-century song collections of Joseph Ritson and David Herd, which refuse that antiquarian logic and reinsert the people in the present. (Her discussion resonates with Leask’s account of Francis Grose and “popular antiquarianism” in his forthcoming study of Burns.) Herd, in particular, emerges as a more philosophically engaged figure than other accounts have recognized. Granting melody priority over words, Herd affirms an acoustic medium for an open-ended work of Humean associationism, generating imagi- nary networks of “national sympathy” located in the bodies of singers and audiences rather than in written texts. To read these essays together is to imagine them in dialogue with one another. Two dialogues especially impress me: Baker’s and Gamer’s, on the work of character in Scott, and Sorensen’s and Ferris’s, on the anachronistic temporalities of Romantic historicism. At first it seems as though anachronism must play a different, even antithetical, role in Sorensen’s and Ferris’s arguments. For Sorensen, “anachronization” denotes the removal of a present entity, “the people,” to the past in the antiquarian accounts of popular poetry. That removal underwrites an Enlightenment narrative of history as the progress of men of property, which is then disrupted by those projects, such as Herd’s and Ritson’s, that provide for “the people’s” active, generative contemporaneity. In Ferris’s argument, conversely, anachronism denotes the vexing persis- tence in the present of an entity that ought to have faded into the past. Ferris distinguishes the remnant, adrift in time, from the antiquarian figure of the relic, rooted in the past. It is tempting to combine these analyses into a Greimasian “semiotic rectangle” (its axes past and present versus synchronicity and anachronicity), which would allow us to ask when (under what conditions) the time of the remnant might be the time of “the people.” Ferris’s remnant is distinctive for being singular, fragmen- tary, a “bit,” broken off from organic totality and function: a condition that would seem to separate it from the collective life of which “the people” is paradigmatic. (Indeed, anachronistic singularity seems to be the condition for consciousness, for the remnant’s persistence as a subject.) Yet Sorensen’s analysis suggests that the radical perturbations

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of historicity that the brought about might consign “the people,” too, to the time of the remnant. If we think of revolution as “the people’s” catastrophic fall out of national life (in a Scottian or Burkean sense), then this fall yields the condition of their becoming a remnant in Ferris’s sense. The time of the remnant is evoked in the famous opening sentence of The Communist Manifesto, which casts revo- lution as “the people’s” spectral form: all the more uncanny for being the portent of an organic embodiment that lies in the future rather than in the past. At first glance, Gamer’s and Baker’s accounts of character enact a neat division of labor, revisiting the paradox that the young heroes of Scott’s novels (Waverley, Bertram/Brown, Lovel) are “flat” characters — so flat, in Gamer’s witty contention, that their generic matrix is the eighteenth-century object narrative — while the “round” characters, invested with ethical density, are secondary figures from the older generation (Talbot, Mannering himself, and Oldbuck; in the case of Waverley, however, perhaps Bradwardine is a more interesting case than Talbot, infused as the former is with a specifically Scottish humanist Latinity). Such figures enact what Baker calls “Stoicism’s noble fail- ure,” an ethical predicament that takes the narrative form of a recur- rent “resistance to history” in Scott’s fiction. Alert to the reflexivity of this predicament, Baker shows how it determines the character of the author, Walter Scott himself, but he is suggestive rather than explicit when it comes to the disposition of the reader. How, we might ask, is our reading shaped through the pedagogical work of Scott’s irony? Does that irony temper the hyperbolically masculine cast of the Stoic ethos, or save it, or transmute it into something else? I would also like to turn the reflexivity question back on both Gam- er’s and Ferris’s essays. If (as Gamer argues) the character Waverley fol- lows the trajectory of the object narrative, and the novel concludes with an aesthetic transvaluation of the object — restoring it from the condi- tion of a commodity to a sentimental synecdoche for landed property — then how might this plot inflect the status of the novel Waverley, the book we are reading, as an object? Gamer rightly highlights Scott’s insistence on the condition of Waverley as a novel, an insistence which unfolds through a series of reflections on the work of reading and (thus) our own relation to the book at hand. “It is from the great book

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of Nature, the same through a thousand editions, whether of black letter or wire-wove and hot-pressed, that I have venturously essayed to read a chapter to the public,” writes Scott in the opening chapter of Waverley (6), casting his own authorial agency as one of reading and acknowledging his book’s condition as an interestingly doubled kind of object: at once (virtual, transcendental) text and (material, time- bound) edition. Lastly, then: to what extent might Scott’s novels inhabit the time of the remnant? (Another distinction needs to be made: the remnant from the remainder.) These are works, notoriously, that press on the horizon of their present by resuscitating past literary forms and genres; their characteristic ploy (elucidated in Gamer’s essay) is to dis- guise the radically innovative and modern in the trappings of the tradi- tional and ancient. Scott’s novels, always reminding us of their status as fictions, acknowledge their own detachment from the cultural function performed, for instance, by works of history, moral philosophy, and other genres of “useful knowledge.” Is the time of the remnant (purpo- sive without purpose) the time of the aesthetic object in Romanticism? And is the novel the literary genre that seeks to redeem that time, with its narrative charge of history-bearing subjectivity effects? To ask such questions is to pay tribute to the complexity and interest of the four essays collected in this issue.

Works Cited

Barnaby, Paul. “Another Tale of Old Mortality: The Translations of Auguste- Jean-Baptiste Defauconpret in the French Reception of Scott,” in Pittock, Reception, 31 – 44. Brown, Ian, ed. The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, 3 vols. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Chandler, James. England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Crawford, Robert. Scotland’s Books: A History of Scottish Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Crawford, Robert, ed. The Scottish Invention of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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Davis, Leith. Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707 – 1830. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Davis, Leith, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen, eds. Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Duff, David, and Catherine Jones, eds. Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aes- thetic. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Duncan, Ian. Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Fielding, Penny. Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain, 1760 – 1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Gottlieb, Evan. Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707 – 1832. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Harris, Jason Marc. Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Heydt-Stevenson, Jillian, and Charlotte Sussman, eds. Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction, 1780 – 1830. Liverpool: Liverpool Uni- versity Press, 2008. Leask, Nigel. Scottish Pastoral: Robert Burns and British Romanticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Lincoln, Andrew. Walter Scott and Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Manning, Susan. Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002. Maxwell, Richard. The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650 – 1950. New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 2009. ——— . “Scott in ,” in Pittock, Reception, 11 – 30. McLane, Maureen N. Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. McNeil, Kenneth. Scotland, Britain, Empire: Writing the Highlands, 1760 – 1860. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. Newman, Steve. Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the to the New Criticism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl- vania Press, 2007. Pittock, Murray. Scottish and Irish Romanticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pittock, Murray, ed. The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe. London: Con- tinuum, 2006.

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Scott, Walter. Waverley, ed. P. D. Garside. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Sorensen, Janet. The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Swaim, Barton. Scottish Men of Letters and the New Public Sphere, 1802 – 1834. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2009. Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Wickman, Matthew. The Ruins of Experience: Scotland’s “Romantick” Highlands and the Birth of the Modern Witness. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

Ian Duncan is professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (1992) and of Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (2007), which won the Saltire Society/National Library of Scotland Research Book of the Year Award for 2008. He is coeditor of Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (2004) and an anthology, Travel Writing, 1700 – 1830 (2005), and he has edited Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1996) and Rob Roy (1998) and James Hogg’s Winter Eve- ning Tales (2002) and Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (forth- coming). His essay “The Moonstone, the Victorian Novel, and Imperialist Panic” appeared in the September 1994 issue of MLQ.

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