Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Coleridge, Hume, and the chains of the Romantic imagination
- 2 The pathos of abstraction: Adam Smith, Ossian, and Samuel Johnson
- 3 Antiquarianism, the Scottish Science of Man, and the emergence of modern disciplinarity
- 4 Melancholy, memory, and the “narrative situation” of history in post-Enlightenment Scotland
- 5 Scott, the Scottish Enlightenment, and Romantic Orientalism
- 6 Walter Scott's Romantic postmodernity
- 7 Putting down the Rising
- 8 Joanna Baillie stages the nation
- 9 William Wordsworth and William Cobbett: Scotch travel and British reform
- 10 Burns's topographies
- 11 At “sang about”: Scottish song and the challenge to British culture
- 12 Romantic spinstrelsy: Anne Bannerman and the sexual politics of the ballad
- 13 “The fause nourice sang”: childhood, child murder, and the formalism of the Scottish ballad revival
- Index
8 - Joanna Baillie stages the nation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Coleridge, Hume, and the chains of the Romantic imagination
- 2 The pathos of abstraction: Adam Smith, Ossian, and Samuel Johnson
- 3 Antiquarianism, the Scottish Science of Man, and the emergence of modern disciplinarity
- 4 Melancholy, memory, and the “narrative situation” of history in post-Enlightenment Scotland
- 5 Scott, the Scottish Enlightenment, and Romantic Orientalism
- 6 Walter Scott's Romantic postmodernity
- 7 Putting down the Rising
- 8 Joanna Baillie stages the nation
- 9 William Wordsworth and William Cobbett: Scotch travel and British reform
- 10 Burns's topographies
- 11 At “sang about”: Scottish song and the challenge to British culture
- 12 Romantic spinstrelsy: Anne Bannerman and the sexual politics of the ballad
- 13 “The fause nourice sang”: childhood, child murder, and the formalism of the Scottish ballad revival
- Index
Summary
In 1824 Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine summarized Joanna Baillie's achievement: “the deep tones of Joanna Baillie's genius struck upon the ear with a thrilling sublimity … [She] sought to direct the taste of the nation and the exertions of its authors, to the legitimate objects of poetry; she brought to the task her counsel and her example.” Such praise almost measures up to Baillie's own ambition – although she would have preferred to see “drama” in the place of “poetry.” Baillie's theoretical writing specifically figures theatre as an ideal means to “direct the taste of the nation.” The question of what nation that is, is complicated for Baillie, an expatriate Scot, by the status of Scotland within Great Britain, and Baillie's status within both. If we recognize that for Baillie Great Britain is truly “forged” (to borrow, as others have done, Linda Colley's phrase) we only begin to assess the complexity of her position. Rather than finding Great Britain to be an organic or homogeneous entity, Baillie's historical fictions acknowledge the degree and kind of labor it takes to make England and Scotland into Britain; together with her theatre theory, they assume the task of keeping up that process of making. Tracing the historical and territorial representation of Britain in plays written across her career – Ethwald (1803; her single English historical tragedy), The Family Legend (1810), and The Phantom (1836) – makes plain the degree and kind of work involved.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism , pp. 139 - 152Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004