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MLitt Module

EN51012: The Romantic Transformation of Scotland

18th Century (the age of the Scottish Enlightenment) and the mid-Victorian period was the assimilation (for want of a better word) of its writing into a ‘British’ literary landscape. This phase is bound up with what is normally designated the Romantic period in British writing, and Scotland, Scottish writers and Scottish texts became major elements in what that period produced One of the dimensions of the radical transition, in Scotland, between the later. Where, before, Scottish literature (particularly poetry) had the strengths of its traditions but was largely ignored by anyone beyond Scotland, in this period Scottish writers found success in a far larger market, but arguably also found that they must take account of their immensely widened audience. The module proposes to look at representative examples of Scottish writing, from James Macpherson to Stevenson, via (crucially) Walter Scott, to examine how different writers responded to this developing social and cultural (and economic) situation.

Module Schedule:

  1. Introduction: the Scottish 18th and 19th Centuries
  2. Ossian
  3. Burns
  4. Walter Scott: The Lay of the Last Minstrel
  5. Walter Scott: Waverley
  6. READING WEEK
  7. James Hogg: Selected Stories and Poems
  8. Selections from Blackwood’s Magazine (Tales, and selections from Noctes Ambrosianae)
  9. John Galt: Annals of the Parish and The Entail
  10. J. G. Lockhart: Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk and Adam Blair
  11. George MacDonald: Alec Forbes of Howglen
  12. R. L. Stevenson: Kidnapped and Catriona

Suggested Further Reading

Ian Duncan: Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton & Oxford, 2007) [on order for the library]

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