Scotland and the 19th-Century World ed. by Gerard Carruthers, David Goldie and Alastair Renfrew (review)

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when the nineteenth century was imagined as a bleak era in Scottish cultural history. For George Davie, it was the period when Scotland's distinctive university system fell into permanent disrepair; for Tom Nairn, it was the epoch when the kitsch of 'vulgar tartanry' took root in place of the cultural nationalist movements blossoming elsewhere across Europe. But as vibrant as those images remain in certain corners of cultural memory, a new portrait of the nineteenth century has emerged over the past two decades. Historians like T. M. Devine and Graeme Morton, and literary scholars like Cairns Craig, Ian Duncan, Penny Fielding, Nigel Leask, Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Murray Pittock and many others have so forcefully countered the former narratives of a derelict nineteenth century that today the latter has become one of the most vibrant fields in Scottish studies. This is so much the case that the excellent volume edited by Gerard Carruthers, David Goldie and Alastair Renfrew bears in some ways a misleading title simply by sporting singular nouns and a definite article: 'Scotland and the nineteenth-century world'. Today, we know, or believe, many Scotlands helped fashion many nineteenth-century worlds, not just one. But the volume attests eloquently to this fact in its contents, portraying Scottish writers and their work in contexts ranging from diverse geographical climes (America, Africa and the South Pacific) and disciplines (novels, folktales and high philosophy) to media (print, iconography and multi-modal propaganda).

Indeed, one of the most striking things about this volume is its matter-of-fact comparativism, an approach that both evokes and helps establish a 'new' Scottish studies that is introspective without seeming introverted. The editors' excellent introductory chapter, for example, rebuts the 'old' narrative of 'the "wasteland" of nineteenth-century [Scottish] literature', while the insightful chapter that follows, by Douglas Gifford, sets forth a revisionist account of the famed 'Scottish Renaissance' that paints a picture of a complementary rather than (more stereotypically) antagonistic relationship between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those are really the only chapters about Scotland per se. After that, the remaining eleven chapters open almost entirely onto comparativist terrain. Let me list several of them here. Andrew Hook shows how Scottish writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries helped shaped a nationalist literature in America. Pam Perkins focuses more narrowly on the ambivalent relationship of Francis Jeffrey and The Edinburgh Review to America, the latter of which served for Jeffrey as a medium for critical reflection on the British Tory administration. Suzanne Gilbert addresses similarities between Scottish and American outlaw-hero ballads, and Susan Manning draws on even more uncanny similarities between the work of the poet Robert Fergusson and Herman Melville's 'Bartleby the Scrivener'. Trevor Royle and Kenneth Simpson write primarily of Scottish cultural exports (Royle of the image of the Scottish soldier abroad, including what he calls a 'military kailyard' literature, and Simpson of the travel narratives crafted by Robert Louis Stevenson), while Michael Fry and Richard Finlay discuss the effects of Scottish endeavours abroad on affairs at home (Fry in the Scottish encounters with the East that helped fashion modern Orientalist discourse and Finlay in the missionary experience in Africa that influenced Scottish missionary tales that then, in turn, helped shape the policies of the missionary effort).

The three remaining chapters take up Scottish relationships with Europe. Johnny Rodger analyses the mutual influence of Scottish and German writing on each other, showing how the concept of the clan evolves (through Thomas Carlyle and William Robertson Smith) into Freudian notions of totemic culture and, more broadly, into the modern concept of culture itself. Ritchie Robertson reveals the impact Nietzsche's work had on Scottish writing, from the 'brutalist (and social-aristocratic) readings' of Alexander Tille in 1890s Glasgow and John Davidson's early twentieth-century poetry to Edwin Muir's under-appreciated critical study...