Dialectics of Improvement

Scottish Romanticism, 1786-1831

AvGerard Lee McKeever

Häftad, Engelska, 2021

Del i serien Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism

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Beskrivning

This book develops new insight into the idea of progress as improvement as the basis for an approach to literary Romanticism in the Scottish context. With chapter case studies covering poetry, short fiction, drama and the novel, it examines a range of key writers: Robert Burns, James Hogg, Walter Scott, Joanna Baillie and John Galt. Improvement, as the book explores, provided a dominant theme for literary texts in this period, just as it saturated the wider culture. It was also of real consequence to questions about what literature is and what it can do: a medium of secular belonging, a vehicle of indefinite exchange, an educational tool or a theoretical guide to history.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2021-12-29
Mått:156 x 234 x 26 mm
Vikt:362 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism
Antal sidor:232
Förlag:Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:9781474441681
Utmärkelser:Winner of British Association of Romantic Studies First Book Prize 2021

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Mer om författaren

Gerard Lee McKeever is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. He has published a range of scholarship on eighteenth and early nineteenth-century literature, with articles in leading journals including Studies in Romanticism and a book co-edited with Alex Benchimol (Routledge, 2018). He is the author of Dialectics of Improvement (EUP 2020).

Recensioner i media

Dialectics of Improvement is a wonderfully insightful study of the interrelated currents of Enlightenment and Romanticism in Scottish literature. Covering commercial, religious, technological, aesthetic, moral, political, educational and scientific "improvement", it reveals how contested this concept was and how important it continues to be for our understanding of the period.

Innehållsförteckning

Introduction1. Robert Burns and ‘Circling Time’2. Short Fictions of Improvement by James Hogg and Walter Scott3. ‘The Great Moral Object’ in Joanna Baillie’s Drama4. The Story of John Galt’s Scottish NovelsCoda: ‘There is no end to machinery’Bibliography