Scottish Men of Letters and the New Public Sphere, 1802-1834

Barton Swaim

2009
219 pages
ISBN 9781611483116
Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Why were Scottish writers able to dominate the field of periodical literature throughout the nineteenth century? Barton Swaim's Scottish Men of Letters and the New Public Sphere, 1802-1834 attempts an answer to that question by examining the period when the Scots' dominance was at its height: the three decades after the founding of the Edinburgh Review in 1802. In this carefully researched and thoughtful study, Swaim discusses the ways in which four writers in the vanguard of Scottish periodical-writing - Francis Jeffrey, John Wilson, John Gibson Lockhart, and Thomas Carlyle - exemplify the historical and cultural dynamics that occasioned Scottish dominance of what Jürgen Habermas would later call the public sphere.

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Reviews

"Barton Swaim's Scottish Men of Letters and the New Public Sphere sets out to ask how and why Scots came to dominate the field of literary journalism in this period [19th century] and how they conjured a "public sphere" in prose...Swaim rightly asks us to reassess the importance of the contribution these authors and editors made in their magazine writing, particularly the way in which they conceived their audience and, in doing so, changed it...Barton Swaim's thoughtful analysis draws welcome attention to [Scottish journalism's] power and influence."

Lodge, Sara. "The Magazine Game: When Scotland's team excelled." The Weekly Standard 7 Sep. 2009: 28, 30.

About the author:

Barton Swaim received his doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. He has written on Scottish topics for the Times Literary Supplement, The Weekly Standard, and a number of academic journals including Prose Studies and Christianity and Literature . With his wife and three daughters he lives in Columbia, South Carolina, where he works in the Office of the Governor.

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