Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745–1820 by Juliet Shields (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 161 and attention in Novalis. Like the authors and period it treats, Becoming Hu­ man is stimulating, difficult, and unresolved, part of the Enlightenment’s rich and sprawling legacy for human self-understanding. Rowan Boyson King’s College, London Juliet Shields. Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 224. $85. Juliet Shields’s ambitious and readable Sentimental Literature and AngloScottish Identity, 1745—1820 unites a political history of Scottish Enlighten­ ment moral philosophy with an intellectual history ofthe British Romantic novel. The book makes three main claims. It contends that Scottish na­ tional sentiment persists after the 1707 Union in a form compatible with the broad-based embrace of Britain and Britishness in Scotland: as a vision of nationhood incommensurate with the telos of the nation-state. This was so in part, Shields argues, because questions offeeling, more specifically the mid-eighteenth-century debates about sympathy and sensibility, provided the ground on which the question ofScotland’s national character and rela­ tion to Britain was addressed. Shields proposes that the participation of novelists as well as philosophers in these debates united multiple forms and genres on the common ground not just of sympathy per se but also of its Scottish—and British—national significance. Some aspects ofthis plotline will sound familiar. Shields’s book is the lat­ est in a series of works in Scottish studies published in the last fifteen years by such scholars as Leith Davis, Robert Crawford, Caroline McCrackenFlesher , and Ian Duncan. This body of work has explored the complexly variegated attitudes of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scottish writers to Britain. It can loosely be characterized as a revision of Tom Nairn’s argument, in The Break-Up ofBritain, that there was no Scottish na­ tionalism in Romantic-period Scotland and, more immediately, of Linda Colley’s emphasis, in Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707—1857, on the enthusi­ asm of Scots for and indispensability to the British national and imperial projects of the period. It is now twenty years since the publication of Britons, and Shields nei­ ther takes on Colley’s argument nor engages in much detail the existing re­ visions to it. Instead she couches her discussion of Scottish ambivalence in the rhetorical terms ofan archival project. The major outcome ofthis quest to “recover understandings of nationhood preceding the model of nation­ state-based nationalism that has dominated literary studies” is the finding SiR, 52 (Spring 2013) 162 BOOK REVIEWS that Scots writers “sought to create a distinctive Scottish identity” even as they took part in forging “an inclusive British identity” (2). Such claims to innovation can feel overstrained, as also with Shields’s parallel assertion that existing scholarship has “tended to relegate discourses of feeling to the do­ mestic and familial much as Scotland has been relegated to the margins of British studies” (8). Yet there is real originality in Shields’s treatment of Scottish feeling in the wake of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. Shields shows how a renewed Scottish identity was inextricably linked with the re­ newal of Britain. Both depended on envisioning a Britain “united by shared feeling,” at once contingent on and in tension with a Scotland that “claimed sentiment as a peculiarly Scottish trait” (2—3). The originality of this argument comes from marrying the concerns of Scottish Romantic studies with the even bulkier tradition of scholarship on the tensions and fractures within the philosophical history of feeling. Shields follows John Mullan and Adela Pinch in examining the effects of contagious sensibility in conjunction with the role ofsympathy as a guaran­ tor of appropriate interpersonal and political relations. Was feeling social and well-regulated or was it self-indulgent and poorly controlled? What were its relations to judgment and the will? Whereas others, most recently Evan Gottlieb, have demonstrated the special interest of sympathy to Scot­ tish writers under Union, Shields shows that the appeal of social feeling to these writers stemmed as much front its moral and political ambiguity as from its naturalizations ofsocial cohesion. Especially in the wake of the ’45, Shields argues, attributions of warm but properly managed feeling became the index of Scotland’s contribution...