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Literature and Union: Scottish Texts, British Contexts
No full textThis volume opens up a new front in interdisciplinary literary studies. There has been a great deal of academic work—both in the Scottish context and more broadly—on the relationship between literature and nationhood, yet almost none on the relationship between literature and unions. This volume introduces the insights of the new British history into mainstream Scottish literary scholarship. The contributors, who are from all shades of the political spectrum, will interrogate from various angles the assumption of a binary opposition between organic Scottish values and those supposedly imposed by an overbearing imperial England. Viewing Scottish literature as a clash between Scottish and English identities loses sight of the internal Scottish political and religious divisions, which, far more than issues of nationhood and union, were the primary sources of conflict in Scottish culture for most of the period of union, until at least the early twentieth century. The aim of the volume is to reconstruct the story of Scottish literature along lines that are more historically persuasive than those of the prevailing grand narratives in the field. The chapters fall into three groups: (1) those that highlight canonical moments in Scottish literary unionism—John Bull, ‘Rule, Britannia’, Humphry Clinker, Ivanhoe, and England, their England; (2) those that investigate key themes and problems, including the Unions of 1603 and 1707, Scottish Augustanism, the Burns cult, Whig–Presbyterian and sentimental Jacobite literatures; and (3) comparative pieces on European and Anglo-Irish phenomena
Introduction
Get PDFAn account of Volney’s life and career, his connections with the Ideologues, the arguments and approaches of his main works, and the longer-term reception of his ideas, especially in Britain and America
Volney, 'The ruins' and 'Catechism of natural law'
No full textVolney was once as influential as Tom Paine, and the author of one of the most popular works of the French Revolutionary era. The Ruins makes an argument for popular sovereignty, couched in the alluring and accessible form of an Oriental dream-tale. A favourite of both Thomas Jefferson, who translated it, and the young Abraham Lincoln, the Ruins advances a scheme of radical, utopian politics premised upon the deconstruction of all the world’s religions. It was widely celebrated by radicals in Britain and America, and exercised an enormous influence on poets from Percy Bysshe Shelley to Walt Whitman for its indictments of tyranny and priestcraft. Volney instead advocates a return to natural precepts shorn of superstition, set out in his sequel, the Catechism of Natural Law. These days Volney enjoys a high profile in African-American Studies as a proponent of Black Egyptianism
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