Kirkyard Romanticism
Death, Modernity and Scottish Literature in the Nineteenth Century
- Describes the role played by death and the grave in Scottish Romantic cultural nationalism
- Explores engagement of authors including James Hogg, John Galt and John Wilson with contemporary debates around anatomy, contagion, psychology and migration, providing new contexts for canonical Scottish Romantic texts
- Considers how kirkyard Romanticism helped to shape understandings of national identity both at home and abroad
The early nineteenth century saw the dead take on new life in Scottish literature; sometimes quite literally. This book brings together a range of Scottish Romantic texts, identifying a shared interest an imagined national dead. It argues that the publications of Edinburgh-based publisher William Blackwood were the crucible for this new form of Scottish cultural nationalism. Scottish Romantic authors including James Hogg, John Wilson and John Galt, use the Romantic kirkyard to engage with, and often challenge, contemporary ideas of modernity. The book also explores the extensive ripples that this cultural moment generated across Scottish, British and wider Anglophone literary sphere over the next century.
Introduction: ‘I was a "Young Mortality"’
1. Intertextuality, Tradition and the Kirkyard Forefathers
2. ‘In the burial ground of his native parish’: Romancing the Kirkyard
3. The Suicide’s Grave: Suicide, Civilisation, and Community
4. The Doctor and the Dead: Anatomy, Feeling and Genre
5. ‘Burking, Bill and Cholera’: Death, Mobility and National Epidemic
6. ‘To lay our bones within the bosom of our native soil’: The Kirkyard in the Age of Migrants
In Kirkyard Romanticism, Sharp transcends the national to make a significant contribution to nationhood theory, as well as 19th-century Scottish literature and politics.
Summing Up: Highly recommended.
Sarah Sharp’s brilliant account of a Blackwood’s-based 'Kirkyard School' of fiction shows how Romantic-era Scotland figured as a repository for regional values at risk of being forgotten in modernity’s sweep. In so doing, the book helpfully reconnects the period with a longer nineteenth century history of both literary and colonial engagements with the dead.
