Kirkyard Romanticism

The early nineteenth century saw the dead take on new life in Scottish literature; sometimes quite literally. Kirkyard Romanticism brings together a range of Scottish Romantic texts, identifying a shared interest in an imagined national dead.

It argues that the publications of Edinburgh-based publisher William Blackwood were the crucible for this new form of Scottish cultural nationalism. Scottish Romantic authors, including James Hogg, John Wilson, and John Galt, use the Romantic kirkyard to engage with, and often challenge, contemporary ideas of modernity.

The book also explores the extensive ripples that this cultural moment generated across the Scottish, British, and wider Anglophone literary sphere over the next century.