Gerard McKeever is Lecturer in Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His research is particularly concerned with discourses of improvement; space, place and regionalism; and book history and material culture. His first monograph, Dialectics of Improvement: Scottish Romanticism, 1786-1831, won the 2021 BARS First Book Prize. His second book, Regional Romanticism: Literature and Southwest Scotland, c.1770–1830, which we discuss below, was recently published by Palgrave Macmillan.
1) How did you come to realise you wanted to write a book about regional writing in the Romantic period?
The book emerges out of the ‘four nations’ complication of Britain that has been so fruitful for Romantic studies in the last few decades. That work has done a fabulous job of ‘devolving’ our literary history beyond a narrowly Anglocentric model, and in Scotland has shown how essential figures like James Macpherson, Robert Burns and Walter Scott must be to any useful notion of Romanticism as a literary phenomenon.
With that said, there’s a potential limiting factor implicit in the ‘four nations’ turn. In Scotland, at least, the very act of making the case for a distinctive national experience may (and sometimes does) work to suppress or flatten a more detailed sense of regional difference within Scotland.
I think that literary studies as a whole remains bound to national frameworks in a way that isn’t so true of, for example, history. We still tend to move between hyper-local individual studies of authors, on the one hand, and national canons on the other.
At the same time as we pay further attention to the colonial and the transnational, then, I’m suggesting that we also need to dig down into the regional in Scotland. Those aren’t mutually exclusive – as I try to show in my book, attending to the regional unlocks a new sense of transnational cultural exchanges, many of which were founded in regional networks of patronage and were reckoning with regional identities.
2) What does focusing on a region let us see that focusing on categories such as the local, the national or the global might cause us to overlook?
To some extent it’s just about fleshing out the sometimes quite circumscribed geography we engage with as literary scholars. Regional perspectives in literary studies tend to be limited to a select few hallowed areas (such as the Lake District) associated with canonical literary authors/works. My book pays attention to a relatively under-appreciated region and tries (as much as seemed feasible in a single book) to sketch out the heterogeneous literary field this presents.
At the same time, I do think that the scalar phenomenon of regions present some distinctive qualities here. Many of the most dynamic things happening in the literary field in Scotland in this period concerned themselves with regional distinctiveness – from Burnsian poetics to the Blackwoodian regional tale to Scott’s Waverley Novels. In quite a bit of the material I look at, the regional inhabits a strange position because it (rather than the nation) is conceived as the actual medium of collective experience. So, on the one hand, it’s presented as the container of a phenomenological sense of place, but on the other it’s a wildly imaginary construct full of irrational ideas about home and belonging.
Precisely where the regional shades into the local is up for debate, and I draw on both analytical categories at different moments in the book. But for me the slightly larger frame of the regional is more helpful than the local in trying to think about fully formed systems of cultural production that dissect the nation. The turn of the nineteenth century is the period that many accounts of nationalism identify with the rise of its modern form – famously, for Benedict Anderson, this was an effect of the proliferation of vernacular print. I don’t disagree, but what I’m saying in this book is that these same processes were also actively producing regional cultures, and those regional cultures weren’t always (or ever) merely uncomplicated subsidiary components of national cultures.
3) How did you pick Dumfriesshire and Galloway as your case study?
I was asked recently whether a version of this project would be possible anywhere in Scotland, and I think it probably would be, although you’d end up with very different books. For that reason, I’m a bit guarded about the terminology of a ‘case study’ here, because it suggests a relatively arbitrary example of something more general. For me, regional culture has replicable, general aspects, but it also manifests quite idiosyncratically in different places.
To outsiders – notably English tourists – Dumfriesshire and Galloway provocatively seemed to fall through the cracks of the available frames of reference. It was different enough to them to seem exotic and alien, but it failed to deliver certain stereotypes of Scottishness that were based on the ‘romantic’ Highlands or the major cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. There’s a sense in which the region generated (and still has today) a peculiarly regional consciousness precisely because of this perceived neither/nor condition, a kind of coherence through exclusion. That sentiment was shared by some insiders, and my book also works to recover their perspectives by tracking the evolution of print culture within the region itself. The process by which print spread outside of Britain’s major cities certainly had generic aspects, but southwest Scotland’s experience was distinctive in, for example, the very early growth of a regional periodical press there.
In general, what I’ve tried to do in the book is offer a rigorous new way of thinking about Romantic-era literary culture. But this is also what Laurence Sterne would call a hobby-horsical sort of a book in that it’s focused on a part of Scotland I know and love. I’m not shy about that even if it’s mostly submerged in the book – so much (all?) academic work is infused with scholars’ lives and interests.
4) Which are your favourites among the regional texts you examine closely in the book?
That’s easy. My favourite without a doubt is John Mactaggart’s Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia (1824), which I discuss at length in my chapter on ‘Subversive Antiquarianism’. It’s an extraordinarily weird book – think Tristram Shandy meets Robert Burns, except in an encyclopaedia (of Galloway). I’m really interested in sui generis literary works in general, and the Gallovidian Encyclopedia also has a puerile sense of humour that I enjoy.
I’m also very fond of the Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song collection edited by R. H. Cromek, notionally a collection of traditional material but (as we know) substantively authored by Allan Cunningham. One of the claims I make in the book is that we need to rethink how we talk about that book – I don’t think that the conventional narrative of Cunningham having foisted his forgeries on an unsuspecting Cromek holds water. The process seems to have been more complicated and collaborative. Perhaps more importantly, though, lots of the poetry in the collection is really good.
There’s more widely known things in the book too, notably novels by Walter Scott and poetry by Burns. But one of the interesting things about taking Dumfriesshire and Galloway as my case study is that those two, arguably the major figures in this period of Scottish literature, both emerge in slightly oblique ways. Burns was based in Dumfriesshire from 1788 but never returned to the distinctly regional poetics he had developed earlier in Ayrshire, and Dumfriesshire took on a difficult reputation posthumously as the place where he came to an untimely death. Scott’s core regional imaginary was also slightly adjacent to Dumfriesshire and Galloway, in the central Borders region around Melrose and Selkirk, although he set Guy Mannering (the period’s single bestselling novel and one of my leitmotifs in the book) as well as Redgauntlet in the southwestern area that I’m focused on.
5) What new projects are you currently working on?
There are loads of threads from this project that I might pick up again someday – I had to leave out so much material to avoid it becomes an unmanageable sprawl. I didn’t really say anything about Thomas Carlyle, for example. He’s back in Dumfriesshire at the tail end of my period writing one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century literature, Sartor Resartus. Aside from considerations of sprawl, a work like that (it’s about a fictional German philosopher) slipped outside the principal rubric of Regional Romanticism, which is looking at literary figurations of the southwest within an emerging world-system. But it does raise an interesting question about how we define a regional or national literature – whether it’s about content, authors’ birthplaces, residences, publishing houses, and so forth.
Anyway, at the moment, I’m continuing to work on Scottish regionalism in different ways – I’ve been collaborating with a colleague at Edinburgh, Professor Hayden Lorimer, on a collaborative network called ‘Scotland’s Regional Condition’ that is proving really exciting. I’m also editing the autobiographies of John Galt for Edinburgh University Press, and keeping busy co-running EDITION, which is Edinburgh’s book history and textual editing group.