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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University
Janet Sorensen. The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 328. $65.00.
Janet Sorensen's The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing is a well-researched and intellectually adroit study of the impact of imperial and national formations on ideas about language in the British Isles. Her focal point is the relationship between England and Scotland which, she suggests, "did not challenge so much as produce the idea that languages conform to national borders" (2). According to Sorensen, the "historical and political context" encouraged the identification and cataloguing of linguistic differences in order that these differences could be assimilated "into a larger British nation" (2). Sorensen's theoretical debts are to post-colonialism and cultural studies. She acknowledges that Scotland occupies a strange position vis a vis colonialism, as the Scots can be seen as both recipients and disseminators of colonial practices. But she makes a case for Scotland's usefulness for postcolonial theory, as it represents "a limit case of the ambivalence between sameness and difference which characterizes imperial English culture in all of Britain's colonial relationships" (4). In carrying out her argument, Sorensen, lays to rest a number of previously influential accounts of Scottish culture and writing and moves the field of Scottish Studies to exciting new ground.
In the Introduction, Sorensen sets out her argument surely and deftly. She draws a connection between the concept of universal grammar found in James Harris' Hermes, or...
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