Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh

Scott's Shadow is the first comprehensive account of the flowering of Scottish fiction between 1802 and 1832, when post-Enlightenment Edinburgh rivaled London as a center for literary and cultural innovation. Ian Duncan shows how Walter Scott became the central figure in these developments, and how he helped redefine the novel as the principal modern genre for the representation of national historical life. Duncan traces the rise of a cultural nationalist ideology and the ascendancy of Scott's Waverley novels in the years after Waterloo. He argues that the key to Scott's achievement and its unprecedented impact was the actualization of a realist aesthetic of fiction, one that offered a socializing model of the imagination as first theorized by Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume. This aesthetic, Duncan contends, provides a powerful novelistic alternative to the Kantian-Coleridgean account of the imagination that has been taken as normative for British Romanticism since the early twentieth century. Duncan goes on to examine in detail how other Scottish writers inspired by Scott's innovations--James Hogg and John Galt in particular--produced in their own novels and tales rival accounts of regional, national, and imperial history. Scott's Shadow illuminates a major but neglected episode of British Romanticism as well as a pivotal moment in the history and development of the novel.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations ix Preface xi PART I 1 Chapter 1: Edinburgh, Capital of the Nineteenth Century 3 A King and No King 3 The Modern Athens 8 A Post-Enlightenment 20 Scotch Novel Writing 31 Chapter 2: The Invention of National Culture 46 A Scottish Romanticism 46 From Political Economy to National Culture 50 "A fast middle-point, and grappling-place" 58 "Patriarch of the National Poetry of Scotland" 65 Chapter 3: Economies of National Character 70 Dirt 70 Purity 78 Beauty 82 Enjoyment 88 Traffic 91 Chapter 4: Modernity's Other Worlds 96 Scott's Highlands 96 Topologies of Modernization 101 Inside and Outside the Wealth of Nations 105 Modernity's Other Worlds 108 Chapter 5: The Rise of Fiction 116 Seeing Nothing 116 The Sphere of Common Life 119 The Rise of the Novel and the Rise of Fiction 123 Fiction and Belief 127 Historical Fiction 135 After History 138 PART II 145 Chapter 6: Hogg's Body 147 Ettrick Shepherd 147 Hogg's Scrapes 150 Men of Letters 155 Border Minstrels 159 The Suicide's Grave 166 Organic Form 173 Chapter 7: The Upright Corpse 183 The Mountain and Fairy School 183 Leagues and Covenants 187 Magical Realism 194 The Upright Corpse 207 Resurrection Men 212 Chapter 8: Theoretical Histories of Society 215 Local Theoretical History 215 Exemplarity: Annals of the Parish 223 Ideology: The Provost 230 Plot: The Entail 235 Chapter 9: Authenticity Effects 246 Post-Enlightenment Postmodernism 246 Revolutionary History 253 Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium 258 Technologies of Self and Other 264 Authenticity Effects 272 Chapter 10: A New Spirit of the Age 287 A Paper Economy 287 The Spirit of the Time 297 Recessional 306 Notes 311 Bibliography 349 Early Nineteenth-Century Periodicals 349 Sources Published before 1900 349 Sources Published after 1900 356 Index 375