Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c4f8m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T11:00:27.472Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - The Aftermath of Union

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2013

Gerard Carruthers
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
Liam McIlvanney
Affiliation:
University of Otago, New Zealand
Get access

Summary

In his now classic The Paradox of Scottish Culture: The Eighteenth-Century Experience (1964), David Daiches divides Scottish writers after the Union into two camps, arguing that ‘Those poets who did not emigrate to England and write in English in an English tradition either wrote in Scotland in English for an English audience or turned to a regional vernacular poetry in a spirit of sociological condescension, patriotic feeling, or antiquarian revival.’ Influenced by the notion of a ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ proposed in G. Gregory Smith’s Scottish Literature: Character and Influence as well as T. S. Eliot’s account of ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, Daiches also suggests that writers after the Union suffered from a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ caused by thinking in one language (Scots) and writing in another (English, the language of power). Daiches’s assessment was initially important in helping to raise awareness of some of the socio-political factors influencing eighteenth-century Scottish literature and has proved extremely influential over the years as critics have grappled with its implications and revised it accordingly. In the Grammar of Empire, for example, Janet Sorensen comments that this assessment of a Scottish ‘split [schiz] mind [phrene]’ pathologises Scottish literature by positing a central, organic national identity against which Scottish national identity appears always already flawed. More recently, in Scottish and Irish Romanticism, Murray Pittock characterises post-Union Scottish writing not in terms of a lack or a splitting but in terms of doubleness: ‘Scottish doubleness was a cultural language, both participative in the British public sphere and withdrawn from it.’

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Smith, G. Gregory, Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (London: Macmillan, 1919), p. 4Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S., ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), p. 247Google Scholar
Simpson, Kenneth, The Protean Scot: The Crisis of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literature (Aberdeen University Press, 1988)Google Scholar
Whatley, Chris, The Scots and the Union (Edinburgh University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watson, James, A Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems both Ancient and Modern. By Several Hands, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Printed for J. Watson, 1706)Google Scholar
Maclaine, Allan, The Christis Kirk Tradition: Scots Poems of Folk Festivity (Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1996)Google Scholar
Recueil des plus belles pièces des poëtes françois, tant anciens que modernes, depuis Villon jusqu’ à M. de Benserade, 5 vols. (Paris: Barbin, 1692)
Benedict, Barbara, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar
Mackenzie, George, Proposals for Printing The Lives and Characters of the Most Eminent Writers of the Scots Nation (Edinburgh, 1707)Google Scholar
Mackenzie, George, Lives and Characters of the Most Eminent Writers of the Scots Nation, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Printed for J. Watson, 1708–22)Google Scholar
Duncan, Douglas, Thomas Ruddiman: A Study in the Scholarship of the Early Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1965)Google Scholar
Pittock, Murray G. H., ‘The Aeneid in the Age of Burlington: A Jacobite Document?’, in Toby Barnard and Jane Clark (ed.), Lord Burlington: Architecture, Art and Life (London: Hambledon, 1995), pp. 231–49Google Scholar
Corbett, John, Written in the Language of the Scottish Nation: A History of Literary Translation into Scots (Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters, 1999), p. 33Google Scholar
Douglas, Gawin, Virgil’s Æneis, Translated into Scottish verse (Edinburgh, 1710), p. 8Google Scholar
Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret, ‘Richard Carew, William Shakespeare, and the Politics of Translating Virgil in Early Modern England and Scotland’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 5:4 (Spring 1999), 507–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ross, Ian and Scobie, Stephen, ‘Patriotic Publishing as a Response to the Union’, in T. I. Rae (ed.), The Union of 1707: Its Impact on Scotland (Edinburgh: Blackie and Son, 1974), p. 107Google Scholar
Jones, Charles, ‘Phonology’, in The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language (Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 267–335Google Scholar
Advertisement, Christ’s-Kirk [sic] on the Green, in Three Cantos (Edinburgh: Printed for the Author, 1718), n.p
Ramsay, Allan, The Ever Green, Being a Collection of Scots Poems, Wrote by the Ingenious before 1600 (Edinburgh, 1724); further references will appear in the textGoogle Scholar
Kersey, Mel, ‘Ballads, Britishness and Hardyknute, 1719–1859’, Scottish Studies Review, 5 (2005), 40–56Google Scholar
Ramsay, Allan, The Scriblers Lash’d (Edinburgh, 1718)Google Scholar
Ramsay, Allan, Tartana, or the Plaid (Edinburgh, 1718)Google Scholar
Ramsay, Allan, Scots Songs (Edinburgh: Printed for the Author, 1718)Google Scholar
Newman, Steve, ‘The Scots Songs of Allan Ramsay: “Lyrick” Transformation, Popular Culture, and the Boundaries of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Modern Language Quarterly, 63:3 (2002), 282Google Scholar
Ramsay, Allan, Elegies on Maggy Johnston, John Cowper and Lucky Wood (Edinburgh: Printed for the Author, 1718)Google Scholar
Ramsay, Allan, Poems (Edinburgh: Printed for the Author, 1720)Google Scholar
Ramsay, Allan, Poems (Edinburgh: T. Ruddiman, 1721)Google Scholar
Pope, Alexander, Eloisa to Abelard. Written by Mr. Pope (London: Bernard Lintot, 1720)Google Scholar
Ramsay, Allan, Patie and Roger: A Pastoral (Edinburgh, 1720)Google Scholar
A View of the Coasts, Countries and Islands within the Limits of the South-Sea-Company (London, 1711), p. 213
Strife and Envy, since the Fall of Man: A Poem, by Josiah Burchet, Esq; (London, 1716)
Burchett published A Complete History of the Most Remarkable Transactions at Sea in 1720, a revised and extended version of his earlier Memoirs of Transactions at Sea during the War with France (1703)
Sambrook, James, James Thomson 1700–1748: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomson, James, Winter (London: J. Millan, 1726), p. 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gerrard, Christine, ‘James Thomson, The Seasons’, in Christine Gerrard (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), p. 197Google Scholar
Abercromby, Patrick, The Martial Atchievements of the Scots Nation (Edinburgh: Robert Freebairn, 1711)Google Scholar
Bowie, Karin, Scottish Public Opinion and the Anglo-Scottish Union, 1699–1707 (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 2007)Google Scholar
Carruthers, Gerard, ‘James Thomson and Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literary Identity’, in Richard Terry (ed.), James Thomson: Essays for the Tercentenary (Liverpool University Press, 2000), pp. 165–90Google Scholar
Daiches, David, The Paradox of Scottish Culture: The Eighteenth-Century Experience (London: Oxford University Press, 1964)Google Scholar
Crawford, Robert, Scotland’s Books (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Davis, Leith, Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707–1830 (Stanford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar
Jung, Sandro, David Mallet, Anglo-Scot: Poetry, Patronage and Politics in the Age of Union (Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont Publishing, 2008)Google Scholar
Pittock, Murray, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sher, Richard B., The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America (University of Chicago Press, 2006)Google Scholar
Sorensen, Janet, The Grammar of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×