Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T14:21:16.008Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Edinburgh and Lowland Scotland

from Part II - Geographies: The Scenes of Literary Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2009

Get access

Summary

Enlightenment and Romance

In the century between David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) and Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837) Lowland Scotland became one of the advanced centres of European and North Atlantic literary culture. Scottish innovations in moral philosophy, history, the social sciences, rhetoric, poetry, periodical journalism and the novel outweighed their English counterparts in the balance of an emerging imperial world order. The intellectuals of the so-called Scottish Enlightenment – Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, William Robertson, Lord Kames, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart and their peers – developed a new, synthetic account of human nature, social organization, economic activity and historical process in a cosmopolitan or universal order of modernity. At the same time, antiquarian scholars and poets began to invoke the national past, ancestral origins and regional popular traditions in an influential series of attempts to reimagine cultural identity in a post-national age. In the early 1760s, James Macpherson’s collections of the ‘Poems of Ossian’ founded European Romanticism upon a scandalous invention of lost national origins. A quarter-century later, Robert Burns fashioned the first decisively modern vernacular style in British poetry. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century Walter Scott’s historical romances combined those distinctively Scottish inventions, universal modernity and a national past, to define the governing form of Western narrative for the next 100 years. Meanwhile the Edinburgh periodicals – The Edinburgh Review, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal – recast the main medium of the nineteenth-century public sphere.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

[Allison, Archibald], ‘On the Proposed National Monument at Edinburgh’, Blackwood’ s Edinburgh Magazine 28 (July 1819),Google Scholar
Blair, Hugh, ‘A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian’, in The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Gaskill, Howard (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995),Google Scholar
Brewer, John The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997),
Brown, Ian, Clancy, Thomas Owen, Manning, Susan and Pittock, Murray (eds.), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Vol. II: Enlightenment, Britain and Empire (1707–1918), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
Brown, Mary Ellen, Burns and Tradition, Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1984.
Burns, Robert, The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, ed. Kinsley, James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.
Carruthers, Gerard, and Rawes, Alan (eds.), English Romanticism and the Celtic World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Chandler, James, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Christensen, Jerome, Romanticism at the End of History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Clive, John, Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review 1802–1815, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957.
Cockburn, Henry, Memorials of His Time, ed. Miller, Karl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974),
Craig, Cairns, Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and English Culture, Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996.
Craig, David, Scottish Literature and the Scottish People, 1680–1830, London: Chatto & Windus, 1961.
Crawford, Robert, Devolving English Literature, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Crawford, Robert,ed., Robert Burns and Cultural Authority, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1997.
Crawford, Robert, ed.,The Scottish Invention of English Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Crawford, Thomas, Burns: A Study of the Poems and Songs, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1960.
Crawford, Thomas, Society and the Lyric: A Study of the Song Culture of Eighteenth Century Scotland, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1979.
Davis, Leith, Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation 1707–1830, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Davis, Leith, Duncan, Ian and Sorensen, Janet (eds.), Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Demata, Massimiliano, and Duncan, Wu (eds.), British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review: Bicentenary Essays, New York: Palgrave, 2002.
Duff, David, and Jones, Catherine (eds.), Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007.
Duncan, Ian, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Ferris, Ina, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991),
Fielding, Penny, Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
Fontana, Biancamaria, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The Edinburgh Review 1802–1832, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Garside, Peter, and Schöwerling, Rainer, The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, Vol. II: 1800–1829, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Gaskill, Howard (ed.), Ossian Revisited, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991.
Gifford, Douglas, James Hogg, Edinburgh: Ramsay Head, 1976.
Goslee, Nancy Moore, Scott the Rhymer, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988.
Gottlieb, Evan, Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1770–1832, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007.
Hart, Francis Russell, Lockhart as Romantic Biographer, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971.
Hayden, John O. (ed.), Scott: The Critical Heritage, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970.
Hechter, Michael, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.
Hogg, James, The Spy, ed. Hughes, Gillian K. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000),
Hogg, James, The Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg, 20 vols., ed. Mack, Douglas S. and Hughes, Gillian, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995–.
Hont, Istvan, and Ignatieff, Michael (eds.), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Hook, Andrew, Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations, 1750–1835, Glasgow: Blackie, 1975.
Irvine, Robert, Enlightenment and Romance: Gender and Agency in Smollett and Scott, Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2000.
[Jeffrey, Francis], ‘Mounier, De l’ influence des Philosophes, Francs-Macons, et Illuminées, sur la Revolution de France’, Edinburgh Review 1 (1802),Google Scholar
[Jeffrey, Francis], ‘Mad. De Stael, De la Litteérature considérée dans ses Rapports avec les Institutions Sociales’, Edinburgh Review 41 (1813),Google Scholar
Johnson, Samuel and Boswell, James, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed. Levi, P. (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1984),
Jones, Catherine, Literary Memory: Scott’s Waverley Novels and the Psychology of Narrative, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003.
Kidd, Colin, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c. 1830, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Klancher, Jon, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.
Lee, Yoon Sun, Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Lincoln, Andrew, Walter Scott and Modernity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
Livingston, Donald W., Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Low, Donald A. (ed.), Robert Burns: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974.
Mack, Douglas S., Scottish Fiction and the British Empire, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Macpherson, James, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Gaskill, Howard, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996.
MacQueen, John, The Enlightenment and Scottish Literature, 2 vols., Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1982, 1989.
Manning, Susan, Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing, Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002.
Manning, Susan, The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Maxwell, Richard, ‘Inundations of Time: A Definition of Scott’s Originality’, ELH 68:2 (2001).Google Scholar
McCracken-Flesher, Caroline, Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
McGuirk, Carol, Robert Burns and the Sentimental Era, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985.
McIlvanney, Liam, Burns the Radical: Poetry and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland, East Linton: Tuckwell, 2002.
McNeil, Ken, Scotland, Britain, Empire: Writing the Highlands, 1760–1860, Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007.
Miller, David, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.
Miller, Karl, Cockburn’s Millennium, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976.
Miller, Karl, Electric Shepherd: A Likeness of James Hogg, London: Faber & Faber, 2004.
Millgate, Jane, Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984.
Muir, Edwin, Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer (London: Routledge, 1936)
Murphy, Peter, Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760–1830, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Nairn, Tom, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, London: NLB, 1981.
Osborne, Peter, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995);
Phillips, Mark Salber, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Pittock, Murray G. H., The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present, London: Routledge, 1991.
Pittock, Murray G. H., Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Potkay, Adam, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Redekop, Magdalene, ‘Beyond Closure: Buried Alive with Hogg’s Justified Sinner’, ELH 52:1 (Spring 1985).Google Scholar
Robertson, Fiona, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic and the Authorities of Fiction, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Russett, Margaret, Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Schoenfield, Mark L., ‘Butchering James Hogg: Romantic Identity in the Magazine Market’, in At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism, ed. Favret, Mary and Watson, Nicola, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Scott, Walter, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. Lamont, Claire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981),
Scott, Walter, The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, 30 vols., ed. Hewitt, David, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993–2008.
Sher, Richard B., Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Sher, Richard B., The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland and America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Simpson, Kenneth G., The Protean Scot: The Crisis of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literature, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988.
Simpson, Kenneth G. (ed.), Burns Now, Edinburgh: Canongate, 1994.
Siskin, Clifford, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Skoblow, Jeffrey, Double Tongue: Scots, Burns, Contradiction, Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2001.
Sorensen, Janet, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Stafford, Fiona, The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988.
Stewart, Dugald, ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D.’, in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. Ross, I. S. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980),Google Scholar
Stewart, Susan, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Sutherland, Kathryn, ‘Fictional Economies: Adam Smith, Sir Walter Scott and the Nineteenth Century Novel’, ELH 54:1 (1987).Google Scholar
Trumpener, Katie, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Welsh, Alexander, The Hero of the Waverley Novels: With New Essays on Scott, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Wickman, Matthew, The Ruins of Experience: Scotland’s ‘Romantick’ Highlands and the Birth of the Modern Witness, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
Wilt, Judith, Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Womack, Peter, Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989.
Youngson, A. J., The Making of Classical Edinburgh, 1750–1840, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966.

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×