"Unprecedented, as Well as Uneven": Repositionning Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literature in a Global Context

Grounded in solid archival research and threaded through with energising injections of new theoretical perspectives on literary history, The International Companion to Scottish Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century (2021) brings a necessary resetting of the national(ist) baseline that characterises much critical discourse on the literary offshoots of the (Scottish) Enlightenment. The volume’s consistent and innovative attention to the interconnectedness of the core and the (semi)periphery, or of the national and the transnational in the multiply mediated, cross- generic, non-homogeneous bodies of literature produced across (and beyond) Scotland in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is proof of the mobilisation of a responsive and adjustable analytical dispositif that may generate further (re)perspectivisations in the future.