Making British Culture: English Readers and the Scottish Enlightenment, 1740-1830

by David Allan

Overview

Making British Culture explores an under-appreciated factor in the emergence of a recognisably British culture. Specifically, it examines the experiences of English readers between around 1707 and 1830 as they grappled, in a variety of circumstances, with the great effusion of Scottish authorship – including the hard-edged intellectual achievements of David Hume, Adam Smith and William Robertson as well as the more accessible contributions of poets like Robert Burns and Walter Scott – that distinguished the age of the Enlightenment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415890243
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	01/06/2011
Series:	Routledge Studies in Cultural History
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	340
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

David Allan is Reader in History at the University of St Andrews. His other books include Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment: Ideas of Scholarship in Early Modern History (1993), Philosophy and Politics in Later Stuart Scotland: Neo-Stoicism, Culture and Ideology in an Age of Crisis, 1540-1690 (2000), Scotland in the Eighteenth Century: Union and Enlightenment (2002), Adam Ferguson (2006) and A Nation of Readers: The Lending Library in Georgian England (2008).

Table of Contents

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

PART I: PROBLEMS

Chapter 1: A Question of Perspective: Scotland and England in the British Enlightenment

PART II: CONTEXTS

Chapter 2: "The Self-Impannelled Jury of the English Court of Criticism": Taste and the Making of the Canon

Chapter 3: "For Learning and For Arms Renown’d": Scotland in the Public Mind

Chapter 4: "An Ample Fund of Amusement and Improvement": Institutional Frameworks for Reading and Reception

Chapter 5: Readers and Their Books: Why, Where and How Did Reading Happen?

PART III: CONTINGENCIES

Chapter 6: "One Longs to Say Something": English Readers, Scottish Authors and

the Contested Text

Chapter 7: "Many Sketches & Scraps of Sentiments": Commonplacing and the Art of Reading

Chapter 8: Copying and Co-opting: Owning the Text

PART IV: CONSTRUCTIONS

Chapter 9: Reading and Meaning: History, Travel and Political Economy

Chapter 10: Mis-reading and Misunderstanding: Encountering Natural Religion and Hume

PART V: CONSEQUENCES

Chapter 11: The Making of British Culture: Reading Identities in the Social History of

Ideas

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

'He [Allan] must be applauded for further redirecting our focus on the consumers and institutions of Enlightenment culture and, above all else, for the magisterial scale of his archival excavations, which incorporates no fewer than fifty local repositories in addition to over a dozen major research libraries.' –Journal of Modern History

'As a repository of unique archival evidence regarding English readers' consumption of Scottish Enlightenment texts, Allan's book is uniquely valuable'. – Project Muse

From the Publisher