Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 2


Book Description

The first thorough study of the book trade during the age of Fergusson and Burns.




Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 2: Enlightenment and Expansion 1707-1800


Book Description

Studies the book trade during the age of Fergusson and BurnsOver 40 leading scholars come together in this volume to scrutinise the development and impact of printing, binding, bookselling, libraries, textbooks, distribution and international trade, copyright, piracy, literacy, music publication, women readers, children's books and cookery books.The 18th century saw Scotland become a global leader in publishing, both through landmark challenges to the early copyright legislation and through the development of intricate overseas markets that extended across Europe, Asia and the Americas. Scots in Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Dublin and Philadelphia amassed fortunes while bringing to international markets classics in medicine and economics by Scottish authors, as well as such enduring works of reference as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Entrepreneurship and a vigorous sense of nationalism brought Scotland from financial destitution at the time of the 1707 Union to extraordinary wealth by the 1790s. Publishing was one of the country's elite new industries.







National Heroes and National Identities


Book Description

This book investigates the concept of the heroic, questions what it is that makes the national hero an indispensable appendage to any possible interpretation of national identity, and asks why scholars stop short before coming to terms with this elusive phenomenon. It finds answers by following heroic traditions in Scotland, Norway and Lithuania from the early modern period to the twentieth century. The book argues that heroic traditions - prevailing trends in situating heroes in national history - owe much to the early modern state. Both national heroes and the nation state had been conceived with a similar moral political mindset that looked for new ways to identify sources for commonality. The confluence of political theory and Realpolitik attested to three classical types of polities, i.e. civitas popularis (democracy), regnum (kingship), and optimatium (aristocracy), as found at that time in Scotland, Norway and Lithuania respectively. The author shows the varied impact these patterns had on heroic traditions. The long record of national heroes in Scotland is explained as a vestige of the legacy of civic humanism, the continuing traditions of the heroic king-lines in Norway are seen as a result of long-standing absolutism, while the belated arrival of national heroes in Lithuania is excused by the country's aristocratic if at times oligarchic past.







Lives of Scottish Poets


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