Conclusion: Compilation and the Literary History of the Scottish Enlightenment

At the moment when Erasmus Darwin’s philosophical poems are portioned out for compilations with specific target audiences, the act of compilation enters the discipline of literary history. Indeed, the resemblance between The Beauties of the Botanic Garden (1803) and our modern-day anthologies is hard to miss. Selections from the work of one or several authors are now offered in publications such as The Norton Anthology of English Literature with the aim of giving the reader a sense of a literary period, a movement, or even an entire field. From a didactic, twenty-first-century perspective, there is no denying that anthologies are at the core of literary history. Whether in the form of the Companion or Oxford Book of Verse advertised to first-year students or the lecture plan with an accompanying pool of digital texts, textual collections are one side of the methodological coin in literary history, the other being accounts where this choice of “beauties” is aligned into a narrative. The aesthetic concept of “beauties” —the forebear to the modern-day “best of”—suggests there is a critical consensus on what constitutes a “beautiful” text. However, what if no such consensus ever existed, if, as Clifford Siskin puts it, literary history turned out to be the product of a few disciplinary curators? Addressing this and other criteria, David Perkins summarizes the complexity of the literary historian’s task in terms of two “aporias”: “the insurmountable contradictions in organizing, structuring, and presenting the subject; and the always unsuccessful attempt of every literary history to explain the development of literature that it describes.”