Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707-1830.(Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University

Leith Davis. Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707-1830. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. 219. $39.50.

The recent devolution of political powers in Great Britain, which has produced a Scottish parliament in Edinburgh for the first time in almost three hundred years, underscores the central point of Leith Davis' felicitously titled Acts of Union. As Davis argues in this timely study, the British nation that came into being in 1707 with the legislative union of Scotland and England was not put into place once and for all but required repeated "acts of union" to stabilize what was (and has remained) an unstable national identity. Her focus in the book is on the ways in which this newly minted British identity came under pressure at different points in the hundred years following the original Act of Union, so that her investigation concentrates less on the now standard claim that identities (whether collective or individual) are constructed than on the significant corollary that they are inherently temporal and hence precarious. Identity, that is, is the effect of the continual activity of identity-making, and in the case of Great Britain, where two forms of identity-making were yoked together into a compound process in 1707, it was an activity shot through with tensions generating not only predictable conflicts but also less predictable crossings and reversals both between and within its two main components. Accordingly, David stresses the degree to which eighteenth-century Britain was characterized by and as a certain dynamic. She defines the new nation in her introduction as "a dynamic process" (1), and her book sets out to track key moments in the history of this process-nation over the course of the long eighteenth century.

It structures its investigation...

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