MLitt in Enlightenment, Romanticism and Nation
Building on recent scholarly activity in literary studies and cultural history from both sides of the Atlantic, this new MLitt programme invites students to rethink the literature and cultural history of the long eighteenth century in Britain, Scotland and Ireland with specific reference to the central conceptual categories of Enlightenment, Romanticism and Nation. It places an emphasis on the way in which national narratives of cultural history are structured and interpreted in the period, both engaging with and challenging the idea of a unified British historical narrative demarcated by the Enlightenment and Romantic movements. The interdisciplinary approach of the programme, with teaching contributions from some of the leading literary scholars, intellectual and cultural historians in the UK, explores the complex interaction of national literary, political and cultural identity in Scotland, England and Ireland from 1707 to the early nineteenth century; a period that witnessed a number of significant and interconnected events: the political Union of Scotland with England, the intellectual flowering of the Scottish Enlightenment with its universal narratives of social and economic modernity, the rise of a new British imperial order abroad, the development of the first modern national literary public sphere, the Union of Ireland with Britain, the innovation of the first modern vernacular style in British poetry and the invention of the historical novel. These latter two literary developments, associated with the writing of Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott—along with James MacPherson’s Ossian—make up the distinctive formation of a Scottish Romanticism that, according to an important recent assessment, ‘attempts to re-imagine Scottish identity in a post-national age’, as well as displaying noticeable continuities with the key themes, concerns, and ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment.
The political, social and cultural resonances of these three expressions of Scottish Romanticism—and the growth of a national literary public sphere which attempted to interpret them, and other cultural issues, for an expanding reading audience throughout the British Isles and beyond—are explored in the first core module: Culture and Identity in the age of Ossian, Burns and Scott . In the second core module, Enlightenment, Romanticism and Nation: Case Studies, students engage with writing from some of the key literary figures of a wider British and Irish Romanticism, examining the poetry of Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron, and the novels of Austen, Edgeworth, Susan Ferrier and Lady Morgan, in order to explore their relation to specific national intellectual and cultural histories, including the legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment, which, in the form of new institutions of publishing and periodical criticism in the period, helped to shape their production and reception. Some of the major themes of the programme are investigated in a number of special 10 week topic modules, including:,The Scottish Enlightenment and Romantic Cultural History , Romantic Orientalism and Romantic Ireland, Embodiments: Literature and Medicine 1750-1900, and Culture, Politics and Society in the Highland Clearances . Students may take module options of up to 20 credits from the wide variety of other postgraduate taught Masters programmes in the Faculty of Arts . Special field trips to the Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland, The Mitchell Library ,and to Abbotsford Library will further highlight the specific historical and material contexts of British and Irish Romanticism, introducing students to the unmatched wealth of archival material in these research areas accessible within 100 miles of Glasgow. By conveying a sense of the current state of the field of scholarship on Scottish Romanticism, the Scottish Enlightenment, and British Romantic literature more generally, the programme should prove very useful for doctoral study in these fields.