Scottish Romanticism, World Literature: some reflections

In September, 2007, Murray Pittock and I organized a weekend conference at the University of California, Berkeley, “Scottish Romanticism in World Literatures,” which was attended by scholars from the British Isles, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Japan and Canada, as well as all over the U.S. One year later, I'd like to take this opportunity to reflect on the terms that made up the title of the conference: Scottish Romanticism, World Literature.

What happens to Romanticism when Scotland is part of the picture? English-language literary histories still identify Romanticism with "English," if no longer so exclusively with lyric poetry or an aesthetic philosophy derived from Coleridge or Shelley. Scotland remains associated with another pseudo-historical category – that is, an ideological category disguised as a historical one – the Enlightenment.

The antithesis between Scottish / Enlightenment, on the one hand, and English / Romanticism, on the other, was fixed early in the nineteenth century: Francis Jeffrey's attack on Wordsworth in the Edinburgh Review accompanied that periodical's retooling of Scottish political economy into an ideological program, and provoked Wordsworth's reciprocal scorn for "Scotch philosophers" – even as his own poetry developed Enlightenment themes. There is no exact Scottish equivalent to the watershed publication of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798. James Macpherson's "Ossian" poems were arguably the founding texts of a North Atlantic Romanticism in the early 1760s; Robert Burns's Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect adapted the "language really spoken by men" to a sophisticated poetics in 1786; and Walter Scott's Waverley changed the shape and weight of the novel after 1814. None of these, however, constituted the experimental break with eighteenth-century norms, flagged with a manifesto (Wordsworth's 1800 preface), that would make Lyrical Ballads not just a Romantic but a proto-Modernist event – at least, in the retrospect of literary history.

The "Ossian" poems appeared at the same time as the quintessentially enlightened projects of the Scottish human sciences – indeed, Edinburgh philosophers subsidized Macpherson's mission to bring back an ancient Highland epic. As I've argued elsewhere, Scottish and English periodizations simply do not match; in the Scottish case it makes more sense to think of a Romantic-and-Enlightenment century, from David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature to Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution, than a distinct phase of Romanticism (divided between generations of major poets) opening around 1790.

What happens to Romanticism when Enlightenment is part of the picture? Hume's Treatise provided a theory of the imagination, and of fiction, as producing and produced by – rather than intrinsically alien to – "common life," the social, the everyday. Fully actualized in Scott's historical novels, Hume's theory would be passed on through them to the realist fiction that dominated nineteenth-century European literature. European realism, in other words, was a Scottish philosophical invention, given fictional form and substance in the Waverley novels.

Yet Scotland remains peripheral to the mainstream institutions of scholarship in the period: this summer's (2007) joint conference of the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for Studies in Romanticism featured just ten papers on Scottish topics out of a total of nearly 250.

The Scottish century of innovations in poetry, philosophy, periodicals and fiction had a massive impact outside the British Isles. Hugh Blair's Rhetoric and Archibald Allison's Aesthetics trained the academies of the New World. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations supplied decisive philosophical arguments against slavery as well as against protectionism. Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson were among the devotés of Ossian, while American poets from Freneau and Whittier to Whitman and Frost took their cue from Burns, the "people's poet," as Robert Crawford argued in his lecture at last year's Scottish Romanticism conference. Scott's novels, as Franco Moretti put it at a roundtable on "The Novel in World History," were the most influential body of work in the history of the genre. Their planetary diffusion coincided with an imperial expansion of British military, administrative and commercial networks that were in large part managed by Scots.

What kind of a "world" was it that Scottish Romanticism helped shape? A continental-European, North Atlantic, settler-colonial world, with Scotland at its center: you could map this world – one where the "tidal wave of modernization" forced a look back at the pre-modern past, materialized in "primitive" regional societies in the process of being overwhelmed – much as Eric Hobsbawm (in The Age of Capital) mapped the nineteenth-century global diffusion of opera-houses. Nor did it all flow one way. The Ossian epics set the pattern of an indigenous high culture for a counter-imperialist national imaginary, while Scott's historical fiction spawned anti-colonial as well as colonial mutations: Ivanhoe was Ho Chi Minh's favorite novel as well as Tony Blair's. [...]

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