In spite of the Scottish cast to the list of writers on the table of contents, this is not a book about Scottish writers. In its largest sense, this book is about what all books about Romantic poetry are about: the Romantic interest in the primitive and the simple; Romantic experiments with form; Romantic problematics of loss; the emergence of a new literary culture during the Romantic period. These subjects all appear under the rubric of the “ballad revival,” a concern with which informs the progress of this book at every point. These issues all border one another, and I find that in traversing the territory of one I inevitably encounter the others. In the same way, the “minor” writers I discuss border on the more major ones; the local becomes the general. Indeed, the practice of the book turns this assertion into a method, and rather than “focusing” on minor or Scottish writers, the claim is that a discussion of one of these writers inevitably, in a sense, becomes a discussion of the others, until the larger discussion inevitably becomes a discussion of the most central concerns of the period.

In the chapters themselves, my materials are linked through metaphors of limitation and boundary, limit and border; in their figurative capacity I mean these metaphors to reproduce the simultaneous action of culture.