books by Leith Davis
Acts of Union explores the political relationship between Scotland and England as it was negotiat... more Acts of Union explores the political relationship between Scotland and England as it was negotiated in the literary realm in the century after the 1707 Act of Union. It examines Britain, one of the precursors to the modern nation, not as a homogeneous, stable unit, but as a dynamic process, a dialogue between heterogeneous elements. Far from being constituted by a single Act of Union, the author contends, Britain was forged—in all the variant senses of that word—from multiple acts of union and dislocation over time.
Accordingly, each of the first five chapters focuses on a discursive encounter between a Scottish and an English writer. Chapter 1 examines the political debate between Daniel Defoe and Lord Belhaven concerning the Act of Union. Chapter 2 considers how Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding used the novel form to highlight their concerns regarding the state of the nation after the 1745 rebellion. Chapter 3 analyzes the debate between James Macpherson and Samuel Johnson over the poems of Ossian and the origins of British culture, concluding with the crucial role played by James Boswell as a political and cultural mediator. Chapter 4 reads William Wordsworth's renegotiation of Robert Burns's work after the Scottish poet's death as illustrative of the contest for control of the British cultural realm at the end of the eighteenth century. Chapter 5 argues that in his 1830 republication of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Walter Scott imagines alternative histories of Britain and of English literature through his negotiations with Thomas Percy and his Scottish predecessors Macpherson and Burns.
The concluding chapter considers the use made of the representation of Scottish national difference in the institutionalization of English literature. As well as plotting out specific moments during which writing served both to trouble and to renegotiate the Union of Great Britain, the book considers the articulation of British national identity within more general questions concerning postcolonial theories of the nation, and also sets itself within the current debate about the future of Scotland within Britain.
In Music, Postcolonialism, and Gender, Leith Davis studies the construction of Irish national ide... more In Music, Postcolonialism, and Gender, Leith Davis studies the construction of Irish national identity from the early eighteenth until the mid-nineteenth centuries, focusing in particular on how texts concerning Irish music, as well as the social settings within which those texts emerged, contributed to the imagining of Ireland as “the Land of Song.” Through her considerations of Irish music collections by the Neals, Edward Bunting, and George Petrie; antiquarian tracts and translations by Joseph Cooper Walker, Charlotte Brooke, and James Hardiman; and lyrics and literary works by Sidney Owenson, Thomas Moore, Samuel Lover, and Dion Boucicault, Davis suggests that music served as an ideal means through which to address the ambiguous and ever-changing terms of the colonial relationship between Ireland and England. Davis also explores the gender issues so closely related to the discourses on both music and national identity during the time, and the influence of print culture and consumer capitalism on the representation of Irish music at home and abroad. She argues that the emergence of a mass market for culture reconfigured the gendered ambiguities already inherent in the discourses on Irish music and identity. Davis’s book will appeal to scholars within Irish studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, print culture, new British history, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies, and ethnomusicology.
While recent scholarship has usefully positioned Burns within the context of British Romanticism ... more While recent scholarship has usefully positioned Burns within the context of British Romanticism as a spokesperson of Scottish national identity, Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture considers Burns's impact in the United States, Canada, and South America, where he has served variously as a site of cultural memory and of creative negotiation. Ambitious in its scope, the volume is divided into five sections that explore: transatlantic concerns in Burns's own work, Burns's early publication in North America, Burns's reception in the Americas, Burns's creation as a site of cultural memory, and extra-literary remediations of Burns, including contemporary digital representations. By tracing the transatlantic modulations of the poet and songwriter and his works, Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture sheds new light on the circuits connecting Scotland and Britain with the evolving cultures of the Americas from the late eighteenth century to the present. Publisher's note.
articles by Leith Davis
Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne
Literature Compas, 2019
The objective of this article is to consider the relevance of memory studies for scholars of eigh... more The objective of this article is to consider the relevance of memory studies for scholars of eighteenth-century literature, and, conversely, the relevance of eighteenth-century literature for the field of memory studies. I begin with a brief evolution of the rise of contemporary memory studies, then move on to consider two important new directions the field is currently taking as it changes to consider issues of mediation and to question the exclusive identification of cultural memory with the nation. I note how eighteenth-century scholarship has already contributed to those new research directions and how it might further contribute. My overarching intention is to encourage more eighteenth-century work that will focus attention on the initial creation and subsequent re-inscription and dissemination of what might seem to be entrenched national memories.
Studies in Romanticism, 2019
As a form of entertainment grouping together miscellaneous activities such as horseback riding an... more As a form of entertainment grouping together miscellaneous activities such as horseback riding and other animal acts, acrobatics, fireworks and, eventually, musical theatre, early circus has suffered from scholarly neglect as it has fallen between disciplines and even between subfields within disciplines. If circus in general has been overlooked by researchers of numerous disciplines, the study of song within circus has been doubly marginalized. In focusing in this essay on the performance and circulation of circus songs at Philip Astley's Amphitheatre, the first site of the modern circus, I seek not only to put one of the most popular Romantic-era sites of entertainment in London back on the map but also, in a complementary approach to that of soundscape studies, to restore a sense of the importance of sound to the sights audiences would have enjoyed there. In particular, I focus here on circus songs as objects that existed at the interstices of the ephemeral and the material, challenging the boundaries between performance and print.
Studies in Scottish Literature, 2012
This article examines how the landscape of English literary studies (“Engl. Lit.”) has altered in... more This article examines how the landscape of English literary studies (“Engl. Lit.”) has altered in such a way as to encourage attention to the matter of Scotland.1 While certain Scottish writers (like Walter Scott) have enjoyed varying degrees of attention in the development of an established (although somewhat fluid) canon of literature in English, Scottish literature as a subject per se has been beyond the purview of scholars of English Literature until the last few decades. But things have changed recently. What factors have encouraged this sea-change and, more pointedly, where do we go from here? Here I trace several paths that have led to the present moment and suggest a productive direction forward for the field of Scottish literature.
Studies in Romanticism, 1997
So great was the success of the Scots that post-1707 Scotland is now widely seen (and studied) as... more So great was the success of the Scots that post-1707 Scotland is now widely seen (and studied) as an early model of today's notions of trans-nationalism and dual citizenship. Scots might have become British, but they never stopped being Scots. It was a pattern played out around the globe, as Scots began to grasp the huge opportunity that lay before them. Scotland might account for only 10 per cent of Britain's population, but it was soon vastly over-represented in the Empire. At the East India Company, for instance, more than half the senior officers and administrators in Bengal were Scots. [Arthur Herman] likes to divide the whole period into three more or less equal parts. For the first 100 years after the treaty was signed, the Scots reaped enormous benefits. "It really brought Scotland into modernity," he says. "It also meant Scotland was able to step into the modern world and make its own contribution."
Studies in Romanticism , 1997
Eighteenth-Century Life, 2011
incollections by Leith Davis
This chapter adopts a rhizomatic approach derived from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as Robe... more This chapter adopts a rhizomatic approach derived from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as Robert Burns is placed into conversation with the contemporary Barbadian writer, Kamau Brathwaite. It also proposes a map between Burns and Brathwaite that is ‘detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification’. Both Burns and Brathwaite have sought to introduce elements of orality into their print-based poetry; to counter the centrality of Standard English poetry with forms derived from their own environments; and to stress the importance of performativity in their work. In ‘History of the Voice’, Brathwaite identifies the pentameter as the dominant mode of English poetry. It has also suggested that one way of ‘unearthing’ neglected ‘anticolonial’ possibilities is to read not just through a ‘generative model’, looking for the roots of postcolonial thought in the work of previous colonial writers, but also to consider points of affiliation that are not necessarily generative.
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books by Leith Davis
Accordingly, each of the first five chapters focuses on a discursive encounter between a Scottish and an English writer. Chapter 1 examines the political debate between Daniel Defoe and Lord Belhaven concerning the Act of Union. Chapter 2 considers how Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding used the novel form to highlight their concerns regarding the state of the nation after the 1745 rebellion. Chapter 3 analyzes the debate between James Macpherson and Samuel Johnson over the poems of Ossian and the origins of British culture, concluding with the crucial role played by James Boswell as a political and cultural mediator. Chapter 4 reads William Wordsworth's renegotiation of Robert Burns's work after the Scottish poet's death as illustrative of the contest for control of the British cultural realm at the end of the eighteenth century. Chapter 5 argues that in his 1830 republication of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Walter Scott imagines alternative histories of Britain and of English literature through his negotiations with Thomas Percy and his Scottish predecessors Macpherson and Burns.
The concluding chapter considers the use made of the representation of Scottish national difference in the institutionalization of English literature. As well as plotting out specific moments during which writing served both to trouble and to renegotiate the Union of Great Britain, the book considers the articulation of British national identity within more general questions concerning postcolonial theories of the nation, and also sets itself within the current debate about the future of Scotland within Britain.
articles by Leith Davis
incollections by Leith Davis
Accordingly, each of the first five chapters focuses on a discursive encounter between a Scottish and an English writer. Chapter 1 examines the political debate between Daniel Defoe and Lord Belhaven concerning the Act of Union. Chapter 2 considers how Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding used the novel form to highlight their concerns regarding the state of the nation after the 1745 rebellion. Chapter 3 analyzes the debate between James Macpherson and Samuel Johnson over the poems of Ossian and the origins of British culture, concluding with the crucial role played by James Boswell as a political and cultural mediator. Chapter 4 reads William Wordsworth's renegotiation of Robert Burns's work after the Scottish poet's death as illustrative of the contest for control of the British cultural realm at the end of the eighteenth century. Chapter 5 argues that in his 1830 republication of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Walter Scott imagines alternative histories of Britain and of English literature through his negotiations with Thomas Percy and his Scottish predecessors Macpherson and Burns.
The concluding chapter considers the use made of the representation of Scottish national difference in the institutionalization of English literature. As well as plotting out specific moments during which writing served both to trouble and to renegotiate the Union of Great Britain, the book considers the articulation of British national identity within more general questions concerning postcolonial theories of the nation, and also sets itself within the current debate about the future of Scotland within Britain.