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

Penny Fielding’s most recent work explores the ramifications of the eighteenth-century study of geography, which sought to unify Great Britain by mapping economic, historical, and scientific narratives across the landscape of the nation. Specifically, Fielding is interested in the intersection of this scientific project with the conceptions of place, or the local, offered by Scottish Romanticism. In her analysis, Fielding traces the ways in which Scottish Romanticism both supports and at times troubles the geographic models of the nation. This complex relationship explains the divergence of Scottish Romanticism from its English counterpart. Ultimately, Fielding argues that the unique conception of place that defines Scottish Romanticism is a product of Scotland’s unstable position within the national discourses that define Great Britain.

The study begins with a description of eighteenth-century theories of geography that offered a general abstraction that could situate and explain every locality. Two models are of particular importance for Fielding’s account. The first, stadial history, the belief that all cultures advanced through four distinct economic stages, allowed for the unification of time and space. Movement across the landscape of Scotland could be understood as a movement toward earlier temporalities. At the same time, geographic surveys could serve the economic function of bringing such places into modernity. Whereas English Romanticism (most often represented by Wordsworth in Fielding’s account) imagined and crafted place from the perspective of individual experience, Scottish Romanticism found itself always dealing with the tension between the local and the larger historical field of which the local was assumed to be a part.

The second geographic model involves the primacy of the North in constructing a national identity for Great Britain. Eighteenth-century climate models attempted to explain cultural difference not through a vision of different cultural temporalities projected spatially across the globe, but rather through the cultural qualities produced by particular climates. Such models argued for the primacy of northern cultural values, placing Scotland in a unique position as both a possible source for British identity and as an inferior supplement to the union.

Initially, Fielding turns to the poetry of Robert Burns to explore the contrast between place as the product of an experiencing subject and place as the result of an abstract mathematical mapping. As a writer linked to a specific region, Burns suggests the difficulty of positioning a locality within an overarching system. In this case, literature functions as a “discourse that destabilises Enlightenment spatiality” (70). However, despite this destabilization the two visions of place are always linked. According to Fielding, “ideas about place as something experiential or individual—ideas we might associate with Romanticism—are produced through the Enlightenment systems that they interrogate” (185). Originating in the same cultural moment, enlightenment spatiality and romanticism depend upon one another.

This point is pursued further, as Fielding employs Scott’s Heart of Midlothian and Rob Roy to integrate the romantic locales that seemingly lie outside of mappable space. Rob Roy, in particular, demonstrates how locations are ultimately determined by the social practices performed within them, freeing them from the abstract space of nationalism and geography. The display of the white wand that transforms a Scottish inn from a public to private space serves as Fielding’s most direct example. However, as she suggests, it would be a mistake to view romantic and geographic space as a simple opposition. It is modernity that transforms the Scottish past into romantic spaces that can serve as both “an alternative and as a prop to modernity” (81). Of particular interest is Fielding’s comparison of the post-1745 road-building in the Highlands and James Macpherson’s publication of Fragments of Ancient Poetry. Initially the two projects seem radically opposed, the “pure romance space” of the Ossianic text is “unbounded by the socially defining features of roads” (80). However, when one considers that the market for the Ossianic hero was the modern British citizen, it becomes clear that “the tactful mourning of the departed...