|
COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University
1
THIS SPECIAL ISSUE OF STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM DRAWS UPON WORK PRESENTED at the sixth meeting of the International Scott Conference, Scott, Scotland and Romanticism, held at the University of Oregon in July 1999. The editors have selected a group of essays addressing the recent turn in romanticist scholarship to issues of national identity and nationalism, focused on the influential and controversial achievement of Walter Scott--whose case, to paraphrase James Chandler, these debates have provocatively reopened.
Scott's antiquarian, historical, poetic and novelistic works formed part of a Scottish contribution to "European Romanticism" which has not yet been adequately assessed or understood. Far from being "peripheral," Lowland Scotland between the 1750s and 1830s was an international center of scientific and literary culture, more influential indeed than London. The philosophers and historians of the Scottish Enlightenment developed a revolutionary understanding of human nature, social organization and historical process in a cosmopolitan or universal order of modernity. At the same time, scholars and poets--James Macpherson and Hugh Blair, Robert Bums, James Hogg and Scott himself--began to invoke the national past, lost ancestral origins and the popular traditions of regional communities, in an influential series of attempts to reimagine Scottish identity in a post-national age. These developments make up a history quite different from the English tradition to which literary criticism, in North America as well as in England, has insistently subordinated them. In Scotland, for example, "Enlightenment" and "Romantic" formations occupy the same historical stage, rather than articulating a succession. The contemporaneous appearance of Macpherson's Ossian epics and the scientific projects of Scottish philosophy contradicts the English developmental model, committed to the teleological emergence of romanticism proper from Augustan neoclassicism via a liminal "pre-romanticism." That model, which continues to structure even recent revisionary accounts of the field, has reduced figures as crucial as Burns and Scott to awkward, supplementary functions. Instead, the elision of one of the great discursive laboratories of modernization has perpetuated an ideological "invention of Scotland" (Murray Pittock's phrase) that takes place in this very period, in the Tory periodicals of the post-Enlightenment--and ensured Scotland's persistence as a romantic artifact, rather than as a site of critical inquiry into the constitution of "Romanticism" itself.
The last few years have seen a notable return of Scotland in literary and cultural studies. Political devolution has issued a decisive challenge to long-standing assumptions about Scotland's destiny in the United Kingdom, and drawn attention to the anomalous constitutions of nation and state, region and empire, in modern British history. The recent turn towards interrogating the categories of nation, nationalism and nationality, initiated by political scientists and historians and taken up by cultural critics, has framed Scotland's status within the Union as exemplary in its very contradictions. (See, especially, Tom Nairn's massively influential inquiry, from The Break-Up of Britain to After Britain; Murray Pittock, The Invention of Scotland; Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature; and...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
