This study explores the complex role of language as an instrument of empire in eighteenth-century British literature. Focusing on the relationship between England and one of its "Celtic colonies," Scotland, Janet Sorensen examines how the expansion of the British empire influenced the formation of a national standard English. The book demonstrates the ambivalence at the heart of British linguistic identity, moving from a close analysis of Scottish writers Alexander MacDonald, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and Tobias Smollett to a revised understanding of the language use of Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen.

Originally published in 2004, Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism is a collection of critical essays devoted to Scottish writing between 1745 and 1830 - a key period marking the contested divide between Scottish Enlightenment and Romanticism in British literary history. Essays in the volume, by leading scholars from Scotland, England, Canada and the USA, address a range of major figures and topics, among them Hume and the Romantic imagination, Burns's poetry, the Scottish song and ballad revivals, gender and national tradition, the prose fiction of Walter Scott and James Hogg, the national theatre of Joanna Baillie, the Romantic varieties of historicism and antiquarianism, Romantic Orientalism, and Scotland as a site of English cultural fantasies. The essays undertake a collective rethinking of the national and period categories that have structured British literary history, by examining the relations between the concepts of Enlightenment and Romanticism as well as between Scottish and English writing.

The period from 1650 to 1800 encompasses the Restoration, the 1688 Revolution, the failure of the Company of Scotland's Darien colony, the 1707 Acts of Union, the Jacobite Risings of 1715 and 1745, and the emergence of the new British Empire as a global superpower. It also witnessed religious, economic, and social upheavals, the beginnings of industrialisation, and the start of the Clearances, as well as the astonishing efflorescence of intellectual activity known as the Scottish Enlightenment. This International Companion offers new perspectives on how the long eighteenth century transformed Scotland's literary cultures - both high and low, dominant and marginalised - in English, Gaelic, Latin, and Scots.

How vocabularies once associated with outsiders became objects of fascination in eighteenth-century Britain While eighteenth-century efforts to standardize the English language have long been studied-from Samuel Johnson's Dictionary to grammar and elocution books of the period-less well-known are the era's popular collections of odd slang, criminal argots, provincial dialects, and nautical jargon. Strange Vernaculars delves into how these published works presented the supposed lexicons of the "common people" and traces the ways that these languages, once shunned and associated with outsiders, became objects of fascination in printed glossaries-from The New Canting Dictionary to Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue-and in novels, poems, and songs, including works by Daniel Defoe, John Gay, Samuel Richardson, Robert Burns, and others. Janet Sorensen argues that the recognition and recovery of outsider languages was part of a transition in the eighteenth century from an aristocratic, exclusive body politic to a British national community based on the rhetoric of inclusion and liberty, as well as the revaluing of a common British past. These representations of the vernacular made room for the "common people" within national culture, but only after representing their language as "strange." Such strange and estranged languages, even or especially in their obscurity, came to be claimed as British, making for complex imaginings of the nation and those who composed it. Odd cant languages, witty slang phrases, provincial terms newly valued for their connection to British history, or nautical jargon repurposed for sentimental connections all toggle, in eighteenth-century jest books, novels, and poems, between the alluringly alien and familiarly British. Shedding new light on the history of the English language, Strange Vernaculars explores how eighteenth-century British literature transformed the patois attributed to those on the margins into living symbols of the nation. Examples of slang from Strange Vernaculars bum-boat woman: one who sells bread, cheese, greens, and liquor to sailors from a small boat alongside a ship collar day: execution day crewnting: groaning, like a grunting horse gentleman's companion: lice gingerbread-work: gilded carvings of a ship's bow and stern luggs: ears mort: a large amount thraw: to argue hotly and loudly

How vocabularies once associated with outsiders became objects of fascination in eighteenth-century Britain While eighteenth-century efforts to standardize the English language have long been studied--from Samuel Johnson's Dictionary to grammar and elocution books of the period--less well-known are the era's popular collections of odd slang, criminal argots, provincial dialects, and nautical jargon. Strange Vernaculars delves into how these published works presented the supposed lexicons of the "common people" and traces the ways that these languages, once shunned and associated with outsiders, became objects of fascination in printed glossaries--from The New Canting Dictionary to Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue--and in novels, poems, and songs, including works by Daniel Defoe, John Gay, Samuel Richardson, Robert Burns, and others. Janet Sorensen argues that the recognition and recovery of outsider languages was part of a transition in the eighteenth century from an aristocratic, exclusive body politic to a British national community based on the rhetoric of inclusion and liberty, as well as the revaluing of a common British past. These representations of the vernacular made room for the "common people" within national culture, but only after representing their language as "strange." Such strange and estranged languages, even or especially in their obscurity, came to be claimed as British, making for complex imaginings of the nation and those who composed it. Odd cant languages, witty slang phrases, provincial terms newly valued for their connection to British history, or nautical jargon repurposed for sentimental connections all toggle, in eighteenth-century jest books, novels, and poems, between the alluringly alien and familiarly British. Shedding new light on the history of the English language, Strange Vernaculars explores how eighteenth-century British literature transformed the patois attributed to those on the margins into living symbols of the nation. Examples of slang from Strange Vernaculars * bum-boat woman: one who sells bread, cheese, greens, and liquor to sailors from a small boat alongside a ship * collar day: execution day * crewnting: groaning, like a grunting horse * gentleman's companion: lice * gingerbread-work: gilded carvings of a ship's bow and stern * luggs: ears * mort: a large amount * thraw: to argue hotly and loudly

Originally published in 2004, Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism is a collection of critical essays devoted to Scottish writing between 1745 and 1830 - a key period marking the contested divide between Scottish Enlightenment and Romanticism in British literary history. Essays in the volume, by leading scholars from Scotland, England, Canada and the USA, address a range of major figures and topics, among them Hume and the Romantic imagination, Burns's poetry, the Scottish song and ballad revivals, gender and national tradition, the prose fiction of Walter Scott and James Hogg, the national theatre of Joanna Baillie, the Romantic varieties of historicism and antiquarianism, Romantic Orientalism, and Scotland as a site of English cultural fantasies. The essays undertake a collective rethinking of the national and period categories that have structured British literary history, by examining the relations between the concepts of Enlightenment and Romanticism as well as between Scottish and English writing.

This study, first published in 2000, examines the complex role of language as an instrument of empire in eighteenth-century British literature. Focusing in particular on the relationship between England and one of its 'celtic colonies', Scotland, Janet Sorensen explores the tensions which arose during a period when the formation of a national standard English coincided with the need to negotiate ever widening imperial linguistic contacts. Close readings of poems, novels, dictionaries, grammars and records of colonial English instruction reveal the deeply conflicting relationship between British national and imperial ideologies. Moving from Scots Gaelic poet Alexander MacDonald to writers such as Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and Tobias Smollett, Sorensen analyses British linguistic practices of imperial domination, including the enforcement of English language usage. The book also engages with the work of Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen to offer a wider understanding of the ambivalent nature of English linguistic identity.