sympathy with a more quintessentially Romantic ideology that insists products of the imagination exist entirely for their own sakes. Literary exchange was imagined to be isolated, protected, and supervised according to rules only specialized practitioners could determine and fulfill. “Exchange” was, indeed, paramount, given the importance of cross-cultural communion, and its necessity marks an obvious difference between the aesthetics of provinciality and a Kantian or Coleridgean notion of aesthetic form as organic or nonpurposive. But even Kant, in the Critique of Judgment (1790), grants aesthetic pleasure a purpose once it is joined with the idea of communication. Regarding “the judgment of taste,” Kant writes that “it does not follow that after it has been given as a pure aesthetic judgment no interest can be combined with it.”70 The highest form of interest that can be added to such a judgment is appreciation of its “universal communicability,” which “almost infinitely increases its value” through demonstrating an “inclination to society.”71 The value of a judgment’s universal communicability—tied to Kant’s “common sense”—gives a social function to aesthetics that admits into its compass relations among persons. “In the sphere of aesthetic culture,” Terry Eagleton writes, with regard to the Kantian imaginary, “we can experience our shared humanity.”72 Kant never describes pure aesthetic judgment as anything other than a priori determined, but the added indirect value of universal communicability provides a powerful model for a literary sphere defined through its own ideals.
The aesthetics of provinciality comprised a heterogeneous number of strategies and commitments—appeals to readers’ sympathy, aestheticized displays of national character, figurations of cross-cultural communion—and different texts exhibit it in widely different ways. Owenson, Scott, and Cooper, for example, were more comfortable with relying on nationally defined conceptions of art than Edgeworth and Irving, for whom such conceptions were especially difficult to swallow, and Edgeworth never fully abandoned literature’s didactic function for the more fully escapist fantasies of Irving and Cooper. London was at the center of all this, as subsequent chapters will show. For now, a famous set piece from Waverley can suggest the intertwined relationship between the history of books and the history of aesthetics that this project as a whole attempts to trace. At the end of that novel, Scott unveils a portrait of Waverley and Fergus Mac-Ivor, the Jacobite rebel and Highland chief who guides Waverley through the romanticized political landscape of Scotland. The portrait hangs in the hall of the newly dispossessed Baron of Bradwardine, whose lowland Scottish manor has been artificially restored by the English gentleman who purchased it after the war. By this time, Waverley has married the daughter of Bradwardine, and Mac-Ivor has been executed for treason. Scott’s description densely crystallizes the implications of his fictional project:
It was a large and animated painting, representing Fergus Mac-Ivor and Waverley in their Highland dress; the scene a wild, rocky, and mountainous pass, down which the clan were descending in the background. It was taken from a spirited sketch, drawn while they were in Edinburgh by a young man of high genius, and had been painted on a full length scale by an eminent London artist. Raeburn himself (whose Highland chiefs do all but walk out of the canvas) could not have done more justice to the subject.73
As many have noted, this portrait encapsulates the aestheticization of history the novel as a whole enacts.74 Few have asked, how was the portrait made? Scott carefully divides labor between Edinburgh, the location of “high genius,” and London, where “eminen[ce]” resides. In Edinburgh, a “young man” makes an unpolished and spontaneous drawing, an ephemeral “sketch” originating, Scott suggests, from deep within the “spirit” of the man himself. This is a Romantic description of the creative process, one that deploys the term genius in its emergent sense to indicate the “exalted ability,” as Raymond Williams has written, of a “special kind of person.”75 Scott’s location of such genius in Edinburgh—and the use he makes of it, to depict Highland dress and Scotland’s sublime scenery—ties it indelibly to national culture.
Yet the drawing transforms significantly as it travels. In London, the once materially insignificant “sketch” expands into “full length scale” under the auspices of a culturally sanctioned figure, the “eminent London artist,” who has distinguished it with his attention and with an elevated medium. Now a painting of magnificent size, it emanates an aura of permanence and authority that defines its artistic power. “The whole piece was generally admired,” Scott writes.76 The return of the sketch from London in its new material form involves the spectacle of its transformation into a serious art object. In mapping the portrait’s production onto the geography of his own novel’s production and distribution—written and printed in Edinburgh, consecrated and sold mostly in the full-scale London marketplace, received as a triumphant success back home—Scott provides a figure both for the plot of his novel and for its making as a material and literary artifact. The tension in the passage between the organic creativity of “genius” and the deliberate yet authoritative skill of the “artist” reflects the tension within the aesthetics of provinciality between the nationally defined essence of the provincial writer and the aesthetic value he claims while seeking acceptance in the metropolis. It also depends on a retreat from the violent political conflict Scott’s novel relegates firmly to the past. This highly self-reflexive moment in Waverley exudes a theory of the “literary” tied ineluctably to the geographically inflected hierarchies of the book trade.
Limits and Structure
The activity of a small group of provincial authors, publishers, and readers could never represent fully the relationship between print culture and literary expression in the early nineteenth century, and I do not claim that it does. I have necessarily left out an enormous amount of material, including poetry. Fiction’s evolving position as a newly legitimated genre makes it an ideal site for tracing the struggles of writers who devised representational modes to fit the contours of the marketplace, although this does not preclude my argument’s relevance for Irish, Scottish, and American poetry of the same period.77 Most important, for me, however, this book does not directly address the print culture of the early black Atlantic, which I have written about elsewhere and continue to explore.78 My research on Edgeworth, Owenson, Scott, Irving, and Cooper has developed concurrently and in relation to research on Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, and William Hamilton. I cannot proceed without drawing some points of comparison and contrast within this interconnected Anglophone archive. London remained the locus of ambitious book publication for all of these writers; Wheatley’s Poems (1773), Sancho’s Letters (1782), and Equaino’s Interesting Narrative (1789)—like Castle Rackrent and The Sketch Book—were London titles shaped by metropolitan ambitions. Wheatley’s transatlantic pilgrimage from Boston to London to oversee the publication of her poetry resonates with the centripetal journeys of elite provincials, and Sancho called Wheatley a “genius in bondage” in an act of judgment deeply evocative of the aesthetic theories explored in this book.79 Yet early black writing entered the realm of print through processes quite different from those under investigation here. Authors like Edgeworth and Irving may have struggled with an uneven literary field, but early black writers faced a book trade that privileged whiteness and granted them access most often through patrons, editors, and amanuenses. Such differences were compounded and reinforced, of course, by wide differences in class and social status.80 In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy begins his critique of “the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture” with a powerful indictment of English cultural nationalism, an “aesthetic and cultural tradition” that “reproduced its nationalism and its ethnocentrism by denying imaginary, invented Englishness any external referents whatsoever.”81 In many ways, elite provincials were among those who most fully benefited from such a “fatal junction,” however distanced they were from Englishness itself. Gilroy’s assessment of black authors’ resistance to and exclusion from dominant aesthetic ideologies has heavily influenced my account of the instantiation of those ideologies as an aesthetics of provinciality.
As we shall see, the social and economic inequalities of the Atlantic world provided
