Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745 – 1820

Cambridge Studies in Romanticism

by Juliet Shields

What did it mean to be British, and more specifically to feel British, in the century following the parliamentary union of Scotland and England? Juliet Shields departs from recent accounts of the Romantic emergence of nationalism by recovering the terms in which eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers understood nationhood. She argues that in the wake of the turmoil surrounding the Union, Scottish writers appealed to sentiment, or refined feeling, to imagine the nation as a community. They sought to transform a Great Britain united by political and economic interests into one united by shared sympathies, even while they used the gendered and racial connotations of sentiment to differentiate sharply between Scottish, English, and British identities. By moving Scotland from the margins to the center of literary history, the book explores how sentiment shaped both the development of British identity and the literature within which writers responded creatively to the idea of nationhood.

239 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 31, 2010

About the author

Dr. Juliet Shields is Professor of English and Khan Chair in the Humanities at Southern Methodist University. She works on the intersections between nationality, gender, and race in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature. She is the author of Nation and Migration: The Making of British Atlantic Literature, 1765 - 1835 (2016), and Mary Prince, Slavery and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World (2021). She also edited Christian Isobel Johnstone's Clan-Albin: A National Tale (1815) for the Chawton House Library of Women's Novels (2022).

Reviews

[Charlie Hoskins · Rating 4 out of 5]

read for my thesis application - an interesting read about sentimentalism in scottish literature!