Literature and Union: Scottish Texts, British Contexts ed. by Gerard Carruthers and Colin Kidd (review)

This wide-ranging collection of essays aims to broaden the study of Scottish literature through greater consideration of its British contexts, and 'to effect a rapprochement between a new British-orientated historiography and an essentialist-nationalist tradition of Scottish literary criticism' (p. 14). Focusing on the place of union and of unionism in Scottish writing since 1707, this is a long overdue contribution from literary studies to two decades of historical research on the topic (pioneered by Catriona MacDonald's collection Unionist Scotland, 1800–1997 [1998] and Graeme Morton's Unionist Nationalism: Governing Urban Scotland, 1830–1860 [1999]).

The central challenge the collection faces, highlighted by Kidd in his introductory chapter, is the 'banality' of unionism. Taken for granted as the far horizon within which more immediately pressing matters of religious, municipal, regional or national belonging have been worked out, the fact of union has been significantly absent from the concerns of writers. In their co-authored chapter Valerie Wallace and Kidd suggest that the dominant form of the novel in Scotland has been defined by interdenominational religious rivalries rather than the exploration of either Scottish or British identity. If, as Robert Crawford argues here, we take Britishness to be a distinctively Scottish project, its neglect within the past literary imagination may decisively weaken its present political potential.

Following Kidd's synoptic overview, the chapters offer case studies of specific authors and texts; the standard is high, and many are effectively oriented towards the larger problems of how Scottish literary studies might aspire to be more British. Andrew Holmes's account of the changing place of union and Presbyterianism in the journalism of the Ulster Scots writers William McComb (1793–1873) and James McKnight (1801–76) makes a compelling case for continued attention to the boundaries of the field. If these questions of inclusion and exclusion have long worried critics, Alison Lumsden shows that their recognition is already central to Scott's imaginative construction of national unity in Ivanhoe and The Fortunes of Nigel. Reversing perspectives, alongside Crawford's account of the reductive English literary vision of Scotland, Brian Young's detailed exploration of A. G. McDonell's 1933 bestseller England, My England asks us to think instead about the Scottish contribution to the cultural imagination of England.

The intersection of historical and literary motifs is clearest in the discussion of the eighteenth century, a period in which literature more directly accommodates political representation. Chapters by Alasdair Raffe and Thomas Keymer explore a range of ideological figurations of Anglo–Scottish relations in satire, caricature and allegory of the period; Ralph McLean examines the original motivations as well as the subsequent adaptations and re-appropriation of James Thomson's 'Rule Britannia'; Carruthers traces the later transformations of Jacobite motifs in the work of Burns and Scott. Reading these essays alongside Christopher Whatley's catalogue of the varying political motivations and meanings associated with statues erected to Burns throughout the nineteenth century highlights one major premise of the recent historiography of unionism: the portability of 'national' symbol and figure between contexts, and their availability to competing political discourses. Stressing the other critical premise, that patriotic or national themes may equally be expressions of unionism, Richard Holmes argues that the forms of Scottish cultural assertion within Allan Ramsay's work are better understood as contributions to unionist paradigms than as a form of Jacobite nationalism.

If Smollett's Humphry Clinker, discussed by Keymer, represents the zenith of unionist Scottish literary production, this is not down to politics. Changing conceptions of the role of literary art in the romantic period displace the overt political function of literary discourse. Moreover, as David Goldie's characteristically lucid chapter argues, the increasingly complex integration of Scottish and British institutions, publishing networks and intellectual life over the course of the nineteenth century makes it increasingly difficult to conceive of Anglo-Scottish relations through the model of dialogue between two separate traditions. This has...