This event celebrates four recently-published monographs in Romantic Studies. For the first part of the event, the four authors (Craig Lamont, Nigel Leask, Gerard Lee McKeever and Matthew Sangster) will be in conversation about the books; in the second part of the event, the virtual floor will be open for questions and discussion.

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The Cultural Memory of Georgian Glasgow (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) provides a long overdue reading of Scotland’s largest city as it was during the long eighteenth century. These formative years of Enlightenment, caught between the tumultuous ages of the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, cast Glasgow in a new and vibrant light. Far from being a dusty metropolis lying in wait for the famous age of shipbuilding, Glasgow was already an imperial hub: as implicated in mass migration and slavery as it was in civic growth and social progression. The book merges historical, literary and memory studies to provide an original blueprint for new research into other cities or civic spaces.

Craig Lamont is Research Associate in the Centre for Robert Burns Studies, working on two AHRC-funded projects: 'Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century' (PI: Gerard Carruthers) and 'The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay' (PI: Murray Pittock). His PhD won the Ross Roy Medal in 2016. He has published on a variety of fields including Scottish Literature, Spatial Humanities, cultural memory, and bibliography.

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Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour c. 1720-1830 (Oxford University Press, 2020) is the first study of its kind dedicated to the literature of the Scottish Highland tour 1720-1830, a major cultural phenomenon which attracted writers and artists like Pennant, Johnson and Boswell, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Hogg, Keats, Daniell, and Turner, as well as numerous less celebrated travellers and tourists. Addressing more than a century's worth of literary and visual accounts of the Highlands, the book casts new light on how the tour developed a modern literature of place, acting as a catalyst for thinking about improvement, landscape, and the shaping of British, Scottish and Gaelic identities.

Nigel Leask is Regius Chair in English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is an internationally recognised scholar who has published widely on British and especially Scottish romantic literature and culture, with a special emphasis on empire, orientalism, travel writing and ‘improvement’. He was CI of the AHRC funded ‘Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour, 1750-1820’ (2014-18), and a co-editor of Old Ways New Roads, Travels in Scotland, 1720-1830 (Birlinn, 2021). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Vice-President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies.

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Dialectics of Improvement: Scottish Romanticism: 1786-1831 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) is a study of the importance of ‘improvement’ to innovations in Scottish literature across the turn of the nineteenth century. With chapters 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. Ranging across many versions of ‘improvement’ – from agriculture to polite taste, and from Christian morality to roads – the book newly illuminates just how contested this ideal was in the period. Dialectics of Improvement has been reviewed by Prof Angela Esterhammer as ‘a wonderfully insightful study of the interrelated currents of Enlightenment and Romanticism’; and by Dr Daniel Cook for the Scottish Literary Review as ‘humanely marshalled intellectual history’ that ‘provides firm foundations for a whole range of studies of Scottish Romanticism or other Romanticisms that might follow’.

Gerard Lee McKeever is currently Research Fellow at the University of Stirling, having recently completed a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Glasgow.

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Living as an Author in the Romantic Period (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) explores how authors profited from their writings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contending that the most tangible benefits were social, rather than financial or aesthetic. It examines authors’ interactions with publishers; the challenges of literary sociability; the vexed construction of enduring careers; the factors that prevented most aspiring writers (particularly the less privileged) from accruing significant rewards; the rhetorical professionalisation of periodicals; and the manners in which emerging paradigms and technologies catalysed a belated transformation in how literary writing was consumed and perceived.

Matthew Sangster is Senior Lecturer in Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History at the University of Glasgow. His recent work includes essays and digital resources on institutions, library practices, cultures of collecting and metropolitan imaginaries. He serves on the Executive of the British Association for Romantic Studies.

Glasgow Romantic Studies Book Celebration