Explores the nature of Scottish Romanticism through its relationship to improvement
This book develops new insight into the idea of progress as improvement as the basis for an approach to literary Romanticism in the Scottish context. With chapter case studies 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. Improvement, as the book explores, provided a dominant theme for literary texts in this period, just as it saturated the wider culture. It was also of real consequence to questions about what literature is and what it can do: a medium of secular belonging, a vehicle of indefinite exchange, an educational tool or a theoretical guide to history.
Gerard Lee McKeever is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow.

Introduction

1. Robert Burns and 'Circling Time'

2. Short Fictions of Improvement by James Hogg and Walter Scott

3. 'The Great Moral Object' in Joanna Baillie's Drama

4. The Story of John Galt's Scottish Novels

Coda: 'There is no end to machinery'

Bibliography

Gerard Lee McKeever is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. He has published a range of scholarship on eighteenth and early nineteenth-century literature, with articles in leading journals including Studies in Romanticism and a book co-edited with Alex Benchimol (Routledge, 2018).