The Scottish Enlightenment and Literary Culture

Ralph McLean and Ronnie Young and Kenneth Simpson (Eds.)

2016
314 pages
ISBN 9781611488005
Studies in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

This collection of essays explores the role played by imaginative writing in the Scottish Enlightenment and its interaction with the values and activities of that movement. Across a broad range of areas via specially commissioned essays by experts in each field, the volume examines the reciprocal traffic between the groundbreaking intellectual project of eighteenth-century Scotland and the imaginative literature of the period, demonstrating that the innovations made by the Scottish literati laid the foundations for developments in imaginative writing in Scotland and further afield. In doing so, it provide a context for the widespread revaluation of the literary culture of the Scottish Enlightenment and the part that culture played in the project of Enlightenment.

Contributions by David Allan; Pam Perkins; Catherine Jones; Ruth Perry; Charles Bradford Bow; Colin Kidd; Corey E. Andrews; Sandro Jung; Deidre Dawson; Andrew Hook and Sarah Winter

Order here

Reviews

"[The Scottish Enlightenment] offer[s] a thorough interrogation of the definitions of Enlightenment and literature and a wide-ranging examination of the relationships between the two."
-Juliet Shields, University of Washington

"One of the achievements of The Scottish Enlightenment and Literary Culture is [a] consistent rethinking of the productive relationships between ideas, institutions, and social groups usually seen as separate. . . . The Scottish Enlightenment and Literary Culture reveals the extent to which we are still discovering the far-reaching consequences of Scottish Enlightenment culture."
-Eighteenth-Century Life, 43:1 (January 2019)

About the editors:

Dr. Ralph McLean is manuscripts curator for the long 18th-Century Collections at the National Library of Scotland.

Dr. Ronnie Young is a university teacher in Scottish literature at the University of Glasgow.

The late Professor Kenneth Simpson (1943-2013) was a distinguished scholar of Scottish literature and expert on Robert Burns.

Distributed by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

eBook: 9781611488012