Overview

This book tracks the rise of modern cultural regionalism across the turn of the nineteenth century. Attending specifically to literature and literary culture, it examines how a particular region—southwest Scotland—was reimagined between 1770 and 1830. Regionalisms were a vital, emergent force in this period, in dialogue with the local, the national, the transnational and the imperial. In the case of southwest Scotland, the literary inscription of the region was generated in a blossoming periodical press; by visitors like Dorothy Wordsworth and John Keats; by resident icon Robert Burns; by homesick emigrants such as Allan Cunningham; by adventurers, colonialists and pirates looking back from within and beyond the formal limits of empire; by the unprecedented success of Walter Scott; and by many others navigating the opportunities presented by rapidly evolving economic, environmental and infrastructural conditions. Regional Romanticism illuminates a neglected aspect of anglophone literary history, acknowledging regions and regionalism as a primary frame of reference in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century culture.

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9783031613241

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Reviews

“McKeever’s description and analysis of this eccentric work is a tour de force, giving an engaging sense of the sheer inventiveness and exuberance of the content as well as making a compelling case for the significance of the book … . this book offers a compelling demonstration of how an engagement with the local, the minor, and the overlooked can enlarge our understanding of Scottish Romanticism as a whole.” (Pam Perkins, Eighteenth-Century Scotland, Vol. 39, 2025)

Author Information

Gerard Lee McKeever is Lecturer in Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is the author of Dialectics of Improvement: Scottish Romanticism, 1786–1831 (2020), the winner of the BARS First Book Prize 2021.

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