Regional Romanticism: Literature and Southwest Scotland, c.1770–1830

This book tracks the rise of modern cultural regionalism across the turn of the nineteenth century. Attending specifically to literature and literary culture, it examines how a particular region—southwest Scotland—was reimagined between 1770 and 1830. Regionalisms were a vital, emergent force in this period, in dialogue with the local, the national, the transnational and the imperial. In the case of southwest Scotland, the literary inscription of the region was generated in a blossoming periodical press; by visitors like Dorothy Wordsworth and John Keats; by resident icon Robert Burns; by homesick emigrants such as Allan Cunningham; by adventurers, colonialists and pirates looking back from within and beyond the formal limits of empire; by the unprecedented success of Walter Scott; and by many others navigating the opportunities presented by rapidly evolving economic, environmental and infrastructural conditions. Regional Romanticism illuminates a neglected aspect of anglophone literary history, acknowledging regions and regionalism as a primary frame of reference in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century culture. Acknowledgements Praise for Regional Romanticism Contents List of Figures Chapter 1: Introduction: Regional Romanticism Anatomy of a Region Inside the Age of Improvement An Itinerary Chapter 2: Travel Writing’s Debatable Land At the Borders of Genre Borderland Time Travel The Bovine Picturesque Scaling the Glenkens Pilgrimage Chapter 3: Of Poets, Mermaids and Brownies The Nithsdale Minstrel Professional Fiction The Mermaid’s Song The Bard of Galloway Never Pay the Brownie Chapter 4: Regional Periodicals Imaginative Regionalism Miscellany and Ephemera in Robert Jackson’s Weeklies Post-War Journalism Parochialism Enormous Gooseberries Chapter 5: Transatlantic Romance and the Curse of Home Romance of Real Life ‘An outrage on probability’ Displacement Navigation Dead Men Telling Tales Chapter 6: Subversive Antiquarianism Species of Folly Scholarcraft and What Not Originality of Mind Local Knowledge Living Text Chapter 7: Furth of the Solway A Prodigious Tale of Libraries Rediscovering Ellangowan Bibliography Manuscript Sources Periodical Sources Primary Works Secondary Works Index