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The International Companion to Scottish Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ecs.2023.0039

1086-315X

Gerard Carruthers,

Scottish History and National Identity

Reviewed by: The International Companion to Scottish Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen Gerard Carruthers Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen, eds., The International Companion to Scottish Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century (Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2022). Pp. 450. $29.95 paper. We have come a long way since David Daiches's The Paradox of Scottish Culture: The Eighteenth-Century Experience (1964). A classic of Scottish literary criticism which did much to foreground eighteenth-century Scottish literature as a vibrantly interesting field, Daiches's book nonetheless suggested that Allan Ramsay, David Hume, James Macpherson, Robert Burns, and many others were involved in a hopeless pursuit. For Daiches, it was impossible properly or with full creative expression to write in a Scotland that was not possessed of a truly holistic culture and which instead featured a damaged tradition (the ideas of T.S. Eliot were writ large here). One symptom of this was a divided culture, a split national mind, where the two sides of Scottish writing in the eighteenth century competed the one against the other: in language, Scots versus English and in politics, patriotic qua nationalist versus unionist. Burns in his "authentic" Scots writing was nonetheless at something of a deficit because of the disempowered nature of his argot, while Scottish writing in English, such as Hume's essays, was synthetic, ersatz even, in the aping of English mores. Such depressing, overarching generalities as Daiches's which largely persuaded other Scottish critics for twenty years or more, are today, thankfully, swept away as eighteenth-century Scottish literary studies has—in a large corpus of scholarly work since the 1980s—treated with nice particularity the Scots poetry [End Page 512] "revival," Scotland's Enlightenment, and Romanticism. The present volume is a welcome addition to that Scottish literary criticism treating the long eighteenth century. It gives importantly appropriate space to Gaelic writing (if Daiches deplored linguistic division, then Gaelic ought to have complicated the Scottish national picture for him even further). Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart provides a bracing account of Scottish Gaelic literature, 1650–1750, encompassing orality, politics, bardic contexts within regional highland tensions, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and Jacobite rebellions. Contra the organic supposition of Daiches, healthy literature requiring healthy constitutional conditions, Stiùbhart nicely summarizes the usually positive transitions and innovations in modes of Gaelic expression as it deals thematically with not always propitious historical circumstances. The same writer usefully highlights, for the novice reader—but with plenty of food for thought for the more advanced scholar—"Gaelic Enlightenment, 1750–1800," again within a context of cultural turmoil, including the early Clearances. Particularly helpful here are his reflections on the British cultural marketplace in which Gaelic literature came to operate. In her chapter, Kate Louise Mathis provides another fascinating summative chapter, on Gaelic women's poetry, with issues of attribution and reception to the fore. The achievements of these writers, especially within the bounds of patriarchal clanship, are genuinely remarkable and remain little known, especially to mainstream Scottish literary history. Sìm Innes, in his chapter, provides a telling case study in Scottish Enlightenment ideas in the Gàidhealtachd, as he utilizes an anonymous poem from the manuscript collection of the Reverend James McLagan. This reviewer learned a huge amount from the Gaelic chapters and was comprehensively tutored in something he only half knew: that if the Gàidhealtachd was linguistically closed off to Anglophones, the reverse was never the case. Macpherson's controversial Ossian poetry, for Daiches one of the most obviously pronounced markers of Scottish inauthenticity in the period, is dealt with by one of today's most productive scholars of Macpherson, Dafydd Moore. In his contribution to this volume, Moore utilizes the developing insights of eighteenth-century geology entangled with ideas of time, elegiacal lament, and fragmentation to paint a deft vignette of the "Ossianic sensibility" (270). This chapter might, even more productively, have been twice the length. Like Stiùbhart also, presumably, taking instruction from the volume editors, Corey E. Andrews writes on Scots poetry from 1650. I would not suggest that such a dating is in itself inappropriate (after all, what do century start and...