In eighteenth-century Britain many of the writings we now call novels functioned as a national form on a number of levels. As a technology of national consciousness along lines Benedict Anderson has described, eighteenth-century novels helped British readers imagine the simultaneous, intertwined existence of fellow Britons. While daily newspapers offered the most widespread and immediate version of printed matter consumed concurrently across vast regions, the circulation of novels throughout the nation and their subsequent reviews, imitations, and sequels, sometimes within the pages of periodical publications, would also underwrite a consciousness of shared cultural touch-points across a geographically diverse English reading population within a roughly contemporaneous time frame. Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) illuminates this phenomenon in particularly high relief, and contemporary criticism of that bestselling book, whether affirmative or oppositional, frequently spoke of its impact on the nation. Within novels themselves writers developed narrative strategies for representing the consciousness of simultaneity that is crucial for imagining the nation – so much so that writers could poke fun at the convention. A discomfited Tristram returns “to my mother” several chapters after leaving her eaves-dropping on his father and uncle through a chink in the door. The intrusive narrator of Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, having broken off the narration of the near-rape of Fanny to relate the dialogue between a Poet and Player, doubles back to “poor Fanny, whom we left in so deplorable a Condition.”

The sea is everywhere, so to speak, in verse and fiction of 1680 to 1820, omnipresent in stories and poems and ranging widely in meaning. Setting, plot device, metaphor, aesthetic object, it is there troubling a sense of fixed national identity but also offering a theatre for heroic national naval exploits; beckoning the intrepid on voyages of discovery or economic opportunity; imposing radical changes on the lives of men and women unlucky enough to fall victim to the press gang or to the punishment of transport; threatening, stranding, and drowning sailors and passengers; eliciting encounters with the sublime; and conveying the goods and people that will fundamentally transform spatial relations and social affiliations. Transatlantic literary studies, aiming to interrogate the model of literary production that restricts it to national borders, might borrow from what some have called “Oceanic Studies” to look not only at the exchange between various geographically based cultures but also at the writing of the sea itself, of the literal space across but also outside of fixed geopolitical territories that was so ubiquitous in writing in English in the long eighteenth century.

Fascination with the sea and sea travel was not new; references to the sea and even international maritime travel abound in writing across centuries. Yet while writing of the sea during the expansion in British maritime empire from 1680 through 1820 extended longstanding maritime themes, it also responded to new realities, such as a growing maritime commercial empire, a mounting trade in slaves, and the increasing consolidation of nationalism. It also took part in and helped shape various generic transformations. Writing generated out of maritime experience in this period ranged from official multi-volume prose accounts of oceanic travels, scientific discoveries, and military encounters to broadsheet ballads and songs recounting everything from English victories at sea to the exploits of infamous buccaneers. It included picaresque and, later, historical fiction, georgic poems describing and even instructing in the ways of maritime labor, and highly aestheticized poetic representations of the sea. In the experiments in fiction writing we have come to call novels and in hybrid verse forms deploying complex uses of voice, these forms comingle and shape each other, as representations of the ocean become the ground for intricate and varying forms of cultural affiliation.

SCOTLAND IN ROMANTICISM

“What a hobbling pace the Scottish Pegasus seems to have adopted in these days,” grumbled William Wordsworth in a letter to R. P. Gillies (February 14, 1815). Wordsworth condemns the “insupportable slovenliness and neglect of syntax and grammar, by which James Hogg's writings are disfigured”; such solecisms may be “excusable in [Hogg] from his education, but Walter Scott knows, and ought to do, better.” Both poets can be summarily dismissed: “They neither of them write a language which has any pretension to be called English.” Wordsworth's complaint cuts across distinct if overlapping conceptions of the institutional framework of British Romantic literature: as a market, in which Scottish writing enjoys a notable success, and as a canon, from which it must be purged – on the grounds of a national deficiency, a linguistic unfitness “to be called English.”

Wordsworth's verdict has proven remarkably durable. Modern literary criticism in Great Britain and North America adopted the view of Romanticism as a unitary phenomenon, the agon of a mighty handful of lyric poets with a Kantian (later Heideggerian) problematic of the transcendental imagination. Some Romanticisms are more Romantic than others: some are the real thing, while others are premature or belated, or simply false – anachronistic or fraudulent simulacra. British Romanticism is English, from Blake and Lyrical Ballads in the 1790s to Keats, Shelley, and Byron (cut off from his own Scottish roots), prematurely dead in the early 1820s.