{"product_id":"9781611486780","title":"Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-Scottish Literature, 1603-1832","description":"\u003cp\u003eJohn Locke asked, “since all things that exist are merely particulars, how come we by general terms?” Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-Scottish Literature, 1603–1832 tells a story about aesthetics and politics that looks back to the 1603 Union of Crowns and James VI\/I’s emigration from Edinburgh to London. Considering the emergence of British unionism alongside the literary rise of both description and “the individual,” Rivka Swenson illuminates the inheritances of 1603, a date of considerable but untraced importance in Anglo-Scottish literary and cultural history. The 1603 Union of Crowns spurred interest in exploring the aesthetic politics of unionism in relation to an alleged Scottish essence that could be manipulated to resist or support “Britishness,” even as the king’s emigration generated a legacy of gendered representations of traveling Scots and “Scotlands-left-behind.” \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDiscussing Bacon, Defoe, Smollett, Johnson, Macpherson, and Ferrier along with lesserknown authors (and ballads, transparencies, newspapers, joke books, cant dictionaries, political speeches, histories, travel narratives, engravings, and material artifacts), Essential Scots describes the years 1603 to 1832 as a crucial period in British history. Paradoxically, the political and cultural exploration of ideas about “unionism” in relation to supposed “essential Scottishness” contributed to the increasing prominence of both description and the “individual” in nineteenth-century Scottish literature, and Swenson persuasively concludes that essential Scottishness (as both “identity” and symbolism) was refigured to mediate a national synthesis between the emergent individual and the nascent British nation—as well as a naturalized, even de-politicized, literary synthesis of particulars within a narrative whole.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bucknell University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47036602810608,"sku":"9781611486780","price":105.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781611486780_p0.jpg?v=1769903461","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781611486780","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}