Introduction: Regional Romanticism

This introduction describes the book’s intervention, calling for systematic attention to regions and regionalism in literary studies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With particular attention to Scottish contexts, it argues that a new act of critical magnification is a necessary response to the source material. Modern cultural regionalism was taking shape in this era within a networked vision of local, national, transnational and imperial space. The chapter introduces the under-appreciated context of southwest Scotland between 1770 and 1830, understood as a regional expression of the so-called ‘age of improvement’. The general remarks are supported by brief readings of texts including Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), short stories by James Hogg, John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–99) and Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815), plus analyses of maps of Ellisland Farm and southwest Scotland as a whole.