Scottish and Irish Romanticism is the first single-author book to
address the main non-English Romanticisms of the British Isles.
Murray Pittock begins by questioning the terms of his chosen title
as he searches for a definition of Romanticism and for the meaning
of "national literature." He proposes certain determining
"triggers" for the recognition of the presence of a national
literature, and also deals with two major problems which are
holding back the development of a new and broader understanding of
British Isles Romanticisms: the survival of outdated assumptions in
ostensibly more modern paradigms, and a lack of understanding of
the full range of dialogues and relationships across the
literatures of these islands. The theorists whose works chiefly
inform the book are Bakhtin, Fanon and Habermas, although they do
not define its arguments, and an alertness to the ways in which
other literary theories inform each other is present throughout the
book.
Pittock examines in turn the historiography, prejudices, and
assumptions of Romantic criticism to date, and how our unexamined
prejudices still stand in the way of our understanding of
individual traditions and the dialogues between them. He then
considers Allan Ramsay's role in song-collecting, hybridizing high
cultural genres with broadside forms, creating in synthetic Scots a
"language really used by men," and promoting a domestic public
sphere. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the Scottish and Irish public
spheres in the later eighteenth century, together with the struggle
for control over national pasts, and the development of the cults
of Romance, the Picturesque and Sentiment: Macpherson, Thomson,
Owenson and Moore are among thewriters discussed. Chapter 5
explores the work of Robert Fergusson and his contemporaries in
both Scotland and Ireland, examining questions of literary
hybridity across not only national but also linguistic borders,
while Chapter 6 provides a brief literary history of Burns' descent
into critical neglect combined with a revaluation of his poetry in
the light of the general argument of the book. Chapter 7 analyzes
the complexities of the linguistic and cultural politics of the
national tale in Ireland through the work of Maria Edgeworth, while
the following chapter considers of Scott in relation to the
national tale, Enlightenment historiography, and the European
nationalities question. Chapter 9 looks at the importance of the
Gothic in Scottish and Irish Romanticism, particularly in the work
of James Hogg and Charles Maturin, while Chapter 10, "Fratriotism,"
explores a new concept in the manner in which Scottish and Irish
literary, political and military figures of the period related to
Empire.
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