Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain 1760–1830 (review)

In her important first book, Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction, Penny Fielding established herself as one of a number of younger academics transforming the field of Scottish Studies by broadening its theoretical parameters. Using a critical template that included Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva, among others, Writing and Orality explored the complex employment of modalities of speech by Scottish writers.

In her current book, Scotland and the Fictions of Geography, Fielding suggests yet another new theoretical direction for Scottish Studies, as she uses Scotland as locus to explore conceptions regarding the relationships among local, national, and global space in the long Romantic era. Fielding outlines eighteenth-century Scotland's paradoxical relationship to geography. On the one hand, she suggests, Scotland was "exemplary" (3) of Enlightenment concerns to "fix" areas of the globe into recognizable systems. After the 1707 Act of Union, for example, Scotland was extensively mapped and described both by and for its southern neighbours. Enlightenment philosophy further emphasized Scotland's geographical character: "Scotland not only developed stadial history … the very geography of the nation [with its primitive Highlands and more 'civilized' Lowlands] demonstrated it" (3). By the end of the eighteenth century, then, Scotland, or "North Britain," as it was sometimes optimistically designated, was an "already written" landscape, one that stood in a supplementary position to England. At the same time, Fielding argues, precisely because of its geography as the most northerly location of a Britain that was starting to define its own northern identity in relation to a southern classical tradition, Scotland came to stand for "the most British part of Britain" (54). In other words, it served as a focal point in the search for Britain's own authentic cultural and linguistic origins. Fielding draws implicitly on Derridean ideas to explain the double position of Scotland both as a location that is "in a secondary relation" to that of England (and therefore in need of being geographically explained) and as the element that "completes Britain's wholeness" (3). Scotland in the Romantic era, she argues, "is always at least two places at the same time: both Scotland and Britain, an ancient or imaginary space and a modern political force, synecdochal for northernness in general and a singular position generating its own national character" (39). Unlike such English writers as Wordsworth and Coleridge, who could turn unproblematically to the local for a source of inspiration, Scottish writers of the Romantic era found themselves having to negotiate between these two positions.

Chapter 1 examines the historical evolution of this paradoxical situation, taking the reader on a quick tour of representations of North Britain in eighteenth-century discourse and of the evolution of a taxonomy of differences between northern and southern areas. Fielding considers, for example, John Wilkes's vitriolic response to Tobias Smollett in the North Briton. Wilkes's Scotophobic periodical denounced the incursions Scots were making into English society. While Wilkes and his compatriot Charles Churchill poured scorn on the notion of "North Britain," however, Germaine de Staël, Edward Jerningham, and Thomas Gray, among others, were busy reconceiving northern Europe as the site of renewed cultural activity, and the work of writers such as John Pinkerton and Jean-Jacques Rousseau was widening the purview of geography to include not only cartography but also "toponymy, myth, language, history, climate, [and] empirical travel" (14).

The chapters that follow expand on how Scottish writers employ geography in its extended sense to create and also to trouble the local, national, and global identities at their disposal. Chapter 2 sheds new light on Robert Burns's position as "the most famous local poet who is also expected to deliver sentiments of universal application" (44). As Fielding points out, such an assessment is based on a "structure of equivalence" in which "each singular locality" is "alike in its very singularity"; because Burns describes his attachment to his own...