Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832 by Evan Gottlieb (review)

73 count of the crucial nexus of law, property , inheritance, and gender in this quartet. The chapters do not all give equal emphasis to the many terms that the argument sets in play, and at times the way the different concepts of property and possession that emerge in the chapter discussions (such as intellectual, real, self-possessive) relate to the land calls for further amplification. Finally, Ms. Glover is throughout the text so sensitive to the historical specificity of the status of women under the law that the sporadic invocation of seemingly transhistorical ideas about the feminine or masculine in the argument is disconcerting . The unexpected detours into Ancient Sumerian poetry and Renaissance representations of the New World designed to demonstrate the existence of a venerable rhetorical tradition of conjoining women’s bodies to land, like some of the claims about the nature of the ‘‘feminine’’ in Robinson Crusoe, are discordant in an otherwise historically nuanced argument. At its best, Engendering Legitimacy describes the historical contradictions that emerged from changing property law. Literary scholars may perhaps wish for additional elucidation of the ‘‘dialectic of the changing intellectual constructions and reconstructions of property and the experimentation of prose fiction.’’ The book claims that ‘‘the role of property in law and culture became a founding preoccupation around which grew the imaginative prose fiction that would develop into . . . the English novel ’’ and that ‘‘late seventeenth-century public debates about power, legitimacy, legal precedent, and sovereignty had been transposed to the private and personal deliberation of the early eighteenth century.’’ Yet the broader reasons why imaginative prose fiction in particular takes on these questions and why they are ‘‘transposed’’ to the private or domestic sphere are not completely laid out; the argument returns to the claim that novelty of fictional form enabled individual writers to grapple with novel social relations as they sought to ‘‘reimagine ’’ the relation of property to personality (which explains the marked emphasis on authorial biography in the chapter arguments). On these terms, fiction becomes a counterfactual means for disenfranchised authors to insinuate their way into an exclusive social and economic order. Even as Engendering Legitimacy opens up compelling questions about the relationship between changes in the law of landed property and changes in fictional form, the book’s wonderfully researched historical itinerary significantly contributes to documenting the complex imbrication of property, law, inheritance, legitimacy, and gender at a crucial moment in the rise of prose fiction. Lynn Festa Rutgers University EVAN GOTTLIEB. Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832. Lewisburg : Bucknell, 2007. Pp. 274. $52.50. Feeling British is an examination of ‘‘the ways in which eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scottish writers played vital roles in constructing and promoting a post-Union British identity that could be embraced by both English and Scots.’’ Mr. Gottlieb supports this with the concept of ‘‘sympathetic nationalism ,’’ which he derives from the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment , as a force of social cohesion and a newly British national identity. It is difficult to argue with this thesis, at least 74 once we get to the 1750s. A writer like Smollett (the subject of the second chapter) is ideal fodder. Roderick Random ’s adventures turn a rough-aroundthe -edges provincial Scot into a consciously metropolitan British gentleman. Smollett later promoted a British identity in his periodical the Briton, although his faith in the Union was sorely tested by the virulent anti-Scottish response of Wilkes in the North Briton. Smollett returned, in Humphry Clinker, with a brilliant exercise in the formation of ‘‘comic unions’’ that are personal, social , and national. Mr. Gottlieb’s chapter on Smollett is well done, but hardly surprises . The remaining hundred-odd pages of Mr. Gottlieb’s book deal with Boswell, Johnson, Scott—writers largely outside the Scriblerian’s vision. It was tempting to insert a Shandean blank page here, as if to say, ‘‘we don’t care, at least officially , about this stuff’’: ‘‘write a review in the space that follows.’’ This notwithstanding, a general comment ought to be made about the book as a whole. While Mr. Gottlieb acknowledges that ‘‘Britishness was always an incomplete and self-divided identity,’’ there is less...