Welcome to My Survey
Routledge has initiated a 4-volume project on Nineteenth-Century Scottish Literature for their Historical Resources series. The team of editors includes Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Ian Duncan, Ken McNeil, Michael Morris, Juliet Shields and Peter Mackay.
We are asking for your input as we assemble volumes that express, showcase, and open ways to understand the period’s insistences and arguments, advances and reactions across literature and additional significant and accessible texts. Each volume will include an introductory essay, subcategories where necessary, and a set of carefully curated texts (including key images).
We would be very grateful for your advice on themes, which themes can be illuminated by being put in conversation, and essential literary and cultural texts.
Our preliminary discussion foregrounds thematic clusters such as Improvement, Clearance, Empire and Diaspora; Science, Technology, Industry and Work; Intellectual History, Education, Law, Religion, Anthropology and Ethnography; Politics, Nationality, Suffrage and Women’s Rights. THESE CAN CHANGE OR BE REFINED BY YOUR INPUT.
What would this mean in a given volume? By way of example, and to provoke your own thoughts and advice, consider:
If a volume focuses on industry it could lead with … Walter Scott. The introductory essay would address this apparent oddity.
What would this mean in terms of materials? The preface to Scott’s Tales of the Crusaders and the introduction to The Fortunes of Nigel could appropriately stand beside an image of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine; an excerpt from Owen’s New View of Society; a report from the trial of the radical weavers; Thomas Carlyle’s fulminations on Work and his critique of Scott for working too much; a poem by Ellen Johnson, the “Factory Girl. This volume could extend through the Dundee People’s Journal, with its welcome to labourers as writers, and include excerpts by working-class poets appearing in the Scottish press. It could showcase the late-period reaction in Celticism, propounded by “Fiona MacLeod” (William Sharp) in short stories and Patrick Geddes—who edited The Evergreen magazine—in urban planning with a deliberately rural twist.
In other words, we are hoping for your help to showcase how very interesting nineteenth-century Scotland could be.
We are asking for your input as we assemble volumes that express, showcase, and open ways to understand the period’s insistences and arguments, advances and reactions across literature and additional significant and accessible texts. Each volume will include an introductory essay, subcategories where necessary, and a set of carefully curated texts (including key images).
We would be very grateful for your advice on themes, which themes can be illuminated by being put in conversation, and essential literary and cultural texts.
Our preliminary discussion foregrounds thematic clusters such as Improvement, Clearance, Empire and Diaspora; Science, Technology, Industry and Work; Intellectual History, Education, Law, Religion, Anthropology and Ethnography; Politics, Nationality, Suffrage and Women’s Rights. THESE CAN CHANGE OR BE REFINED BY YOUR INPUT.
What would this mean in a given volume? By way of example, and to provoke your own thoughts and advice, consider:
If a volume focuses on industry it could lead with … Walter Scott. The introductory essay would address this apparent oddity.
What would this mean in terms of materials? The preface to Scott’s Tales of the Crusaders and the introduction to The Fortunes of Nigel could appropriately stand beside an image of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine; an excerpt from Owen’s New View of Society; a report from the trial of the radical weavers; Thomas Carlyle’s fulminations on Work and his critique of Scott for working too much; a poem by Ellen Johnson, the “Factory Girl. This volume could extend through the Dundee People’s Journal, with its welcome to labourers as writers, and include excerpts by working-class poets appearing in the Scottish press. It could showcase the late-period reaction in Celticism, propounded by “Fiona MacLeod” (William Sharp) in short stories and Patrick Geddes—who edited The Evergreen magazine—in urban planning with a deliberately rural twist.
In other words, we are hoping for your help to showcase how very interesting nineteenth-century Scotland could be.