Dialectics of Improvement : : Scottish Romanticism, 1786-1831 / / Gerard Lee McKeever.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Complete eBook-Package 2020
• VerfasserIn: McKeever, Gerard Lee,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism : ECSR
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (232 p.)

WINNER of the BARS First Book Prize 2021!Explores the nature of Scottish Romanticism through its relationship to improvementProvides new insight into the concept of ‘improvement’Advances current thinking on Scottish RomanticismIdentifies how improvement was involved in key aesthetic innovations in the periodIncludes case studies across poetry, short fiction, drama and the novelThis 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Chapter 1 Robert Burns and ‘Circling Time’ -- Chapter 2 Short Fictions of Improvement by James Hogg and Walter Scott -- Chapter 3 ‘The Great Moral Object’ in Joanna Baillie’s Drama -- Chapter 4 The Story of John Galt’s Scottish Novels -- Coda: ‘There is no end to machinery’ -- Bibliography -- Index