Scotland and the Fictions of Geography

Abstract

Focusing on the relationship between England and Scotland and the interaction between history and geography, Penny Fielding explores how Scottish literature in the Romantic period was shaped by the understanding of place and space. This book examines geography as a form of regional, national and global definition, addressing national surveys, local stories, place-names and travel writing, and argues that the case of Scotland complicates the identification of Romanticism with the local. Fielding considers Scotland as 'North Britain' in a period when the North of Europe was becoming a strong cultural and political identity, and explores ways in which Scotland was both formative and disruptive of British national consciousness. Containing studies of Robert Burns, Walter Scott and James Hogg, as well as the lesser-known figures of Anne Grant and Margaret Chalmers, this study discusses an exceptionally broad range of historical, geographical, scientific, linguistic, antiquarian and political writing from throughout North Britain.

Situating Scotland in Eighteenth‐Century Studies

“…For instance, Matthew Wickman’s The Ruins of Experience (2007) locates the culturally and politically marginal Scottish Highlands at the centre of a major late 18th‐century epistemological shift that resulted in the devaluation of direct experience in comparison to juridical probability. Penny Fielding’s Scotland and the Fictions of Geography (2008) demonstrates 18th‐century Scotland’s contributions to another mode of thinking that we might regard as constitutive of modernity by examining Scottish writers’ historicization of space. Gottlieb’s Feeling British (2007) and Shields’s Sentimental Literature and Anglo‐Scottish Identity (2010) draw respectively on Hume’s and Smith’s theories of sympathy to examine how the 18th century’s culture of sensibility participated in the formation of British identity.…”