Scotland and the Borders of Romanticim. Leith Davis

British Romanticism has generally been understood as an English movement, associated primarily with a handful of lyric poets. Scotland, in this definition, was a Romantic place, but not a site of Romantic production. At best, Scotland produced only an ‘inauthentic Romanticism’—the Highlandisms of James Macpherson and Walter Scott. At worst, through the Scottish Enlightenment’s ideas on political economy, Scotland repressed Romanticism. The near-unanimous assessment of Scottish nationalist critics, until recent years, that the nineteenth century saw the end of a Scottish tradition, only served to validate an anglocentric definition of Romanticism.

But new literary trends such as post-colonial studies, the de-emphasis on the nation as the site of cultural transmission, and the tendency in recent years to see Romanticism as part of the long eighteenth century make it easier to liberate the narrative of Scottish literary development from the English model. This collection of essays makes a strong case that rather than place Scotland on the borders of Romanticism, the very category of Romanticism should be rethought. In Scotland, Romanticism did not develop in succession to Classicism, but was contemporary to it, and the French Revolution was not nearly as central to the origins of Scottish Romanticism as in the English narrative. Seen in terms of a larger political, economic, and cultural geography of Europe, North America, and an expanding world horizon, Scotland can be viewed as a “critical site for the invention or production of ‘Romanticism’” (10).

The thirteen essays in this collection look at the period from 1745 to 1830 and cover a variety of topics. Cairns Craig examines Coleridge as a way to consider some of the differences between English and Scottish Romanticism, arguing that Scottish Romanticism cannot be viewed in terms of the development of the transcendental imagination. Rather, Scotland’s Romanticism must be considered “in terms of the elaboration of the significance of associationist theories both of mind and of art” (31), theories closely connected to Hume which Coleridge rejected. Both Susan Manning and Ina Ferris look at the telling of history in post-Enlightenment Scotland. Manning looks at the effects of antiquarianism on the field of philosophical history, finding that by placing the marginal at the center of attention, antiquarianism was a sort of “historiographical mock-heroic unwriting the epic imperialism of the Science of Man” (73). Ferris notes that the “history-mindedness” of turn of the century Scotland was found by contemporaries more in Scott and the novel than in the histories of Hume or Robertson. That form, she says, foregrounded history less as the recovery of the past as anxiety about a diminished present.

This collection takes Walter Scott seriously as a producer of Romanticism, rather than berate him for his supposed ‘inauthenticity.’ James Watt examines what he calls Scott’s distinctive brand of Romantic Orientalism, found in The Surgeon’s Daughter and The Talisman. Scott never questioned the morality of the British presence overseas. Nonetheless, in these two novels, in contrast to most of his contemporaries’ writings on the East, Scott “upheld the ideas of human uniformity and eschewed the language of type and essence […] and examined the often unpredictable consequences of cultural contact and encounter.” (108). In “Walter Scott’s Romantic Postmodernity,” Jerome McGann endeavors to recover the early, original view of Scott as a Romantic. He examines the self-consciousness of Scott’s fiction, considering it to be as essential to him as it was to Byron. Scott makes the subject of tale-telling an explicit preoccupation of his fiction, establishing first a real world from which there can be a Romantic escape. In this sense, McGann argues, Ivanhoe is Scott’s masterpiece, as one of its chief concern is that the reader never lose sight of Scott’s powers of historical inventiveness.

Leith Davis cautions that while Robert Burns has recently begun to be considered within the framework of Romanticism, rather than simply absorbing him into that framework, scholars should use his example to rethink literary definitions. Burns, she contends, used the radical potential of the Scottish song tradition to challenge the homogeneity of the British nation and the literary market. He wanted to establish the collecting of Scottish music as an alternative practice to the marketing of poetry. Instead of positing the writer as the authority and the reader as the consumer, Burns expected his readers to participate in the process of cultural production by drawing on their knowledge of Scottish song culture. In this volume’s other examination of Burns, Penny Fielding looks as his work in terms of the evolution of ideas about place, writing, and difference throughout the eighteenth century, arguing that we must be careful about identifying Burns as a ‘local’ poet.

One of the most intriguing pieces in the collection is John Barrell’s “Putting Down the Rising,” an examination of James Hogg’s Three Perils of Woman and its recurrent motif of corpses that sit up or refuse to lie down. The figure of the upright corpse, he argues, symbolizes the resurrection of that which was thought to be safely consigned to the past, and thus becomes a means to raise questions about how modern Scotland should understand its violent history. Alyson Bardsley traces the historical and territorial representations of Great Britain in Joanna Baillie’s plays, finding that rather than seeing Great Britain as an organic entity, Baillie acknowledged the effort needed to make ‘Great Britain’ out of ‘Scotland’ and ‘England.’ Peter Manning compares the roughly contemporary Scottish tours of William Wordsworth and William Cobbett as a means of considering distinctions between two writers often viewed as “nostalgic relics of the agricultural order of their childhoods” (153) and of suggesting general points about the relation of geographical place and rhetorical places of argument. The volume concludes with two essays that consider the ballad and gender politics. In examining the work of Anne Bannerman, Adriana Craciun argues for a reconsideration of the importance of the Gothic in understanding the cultural significance of the Romantic-era Scottish ballad. Bannerman challenged the prevailing sexual politics by publishing her own ballads, rather than serving as the female source of an oral tradition utilized by men, and by writing Gothic poetry, a controversial form for women. Her work met a hostile reception, but it illuminates the sexual politics of the Scottish ballad revival and forces us to look beyond the minstrel tradition favored by Scott, to find a fuller picture of the ballad tradition of the period. Ann Rowland, too, considers the importance of women as transmitters of ballads, and therefore as preservers of the national culture. Rowland asks how the Scottish ballad collectors reconciled the scandalous subjects of the ballads, such as infanticide, with the nationalist purpose of the project, and she concludes that they disregarded content and privileged form as a vehicle of cultural expression. Nonetheless, she argues, content did speak through.

This collection makes a forceful case for the importance of Scotland’s contribution to British Romanticism and for a reconsideration of the canonical understanding of that literary movement. I recommend it to scholars of Romanticism, Scottish literary history, and of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British literature in general.