The Scottish picaresque as environmental justice

Denys Van Renen (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

240 Seiten

2025
Voltaire Foundation (Verlag)
978-1-80207-206-8 (ISBN)

Noch nicht erschienen (ca. Februar 2025)
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Critics who focus on the picaresque reflect this social animus but rarely address how these authors perceive marginal societies, as not only vulnerable peoples but also environments. What were the conditions that allowed the picaresque to flourish in Scotland?

The picaresque novel has always generated widespread appeal due to the charisma and charm of its roguish main characters, who live by their wits on the margins of society. Spanish and English satires feature the perseverance and resilience of picaros who skirt and challenge the overreach of authoritarian regimes. Critics who focus on the picaresque reflect this social animus but rarely address how these authors perceive marginal societies, as not only vulnerable peoples but also environments.

What were the conditions that allowed the picaresque to flourish in Scotland? Spanning from 1748-1857, this study posits that England’s imaginative and physical re-engineering of Scotland prompts Scottish authors, and those of Scottish descent, to recognize not only the allyship between the picaro and local environments and climates, but also the power that stems from it. The book includes chapters on a diverse set of authors, including Tobias Smollett, Samuel Johnson, John Galt, Charlotte Lennox, Mungo Park, James Hogg, and Mary Seacole. They deploy the picaresque to foreground discrete and interconnected environments that are under duress because of English efforts to establish an imperial totality.

What Van Renen calls the “Scottish picaresque” integrates the major characteristics of the genre with the picaro’s response to environmental precarity. Ultimately, the texts studied here model for readers how to eschew cartographic or imperial semiotics, and recognize physical features and places long forgotten or appropriated by the state for large-scale economic development.

Denys Van Renen is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He is the author of 'The Other Exchange: Women, Servants, and the Urban Underclass in Early Modern England' and co-editor of 'Beyond 1776'. He has a critical edition of Dorothy Wordsworth's journals forthcoming.

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Ecological picaro in Tobias Smollett's Roderick Random

i. Random in the London underworld

ii. Mrs. Sagely, Sussex, and the fulfillment of the picaresque

Chapter 2 "Her strange mockery": Balwhidder, the Gaffaws, and the survival of the Scottish picaresque

i. Balwhidder, bees, and butterflies

ii. Jenny and Meg Gffaw: burial and resurrection of the picaresque

Chapter 3 "Eyes fixed on the ground": the Scottish picaresque in Colonial America

i. Passage to America

ii. America and new literatures

iii. Euphemia, (male) passion, and (female) resistance

iv. America and the cold

Chapter 4 Emigration and ecocatastrophe in Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

i. Locating the denuded Highlands

ii. Exposing the picturesque

Chapter 5 The Picaresque and Scottish-African independence

i. Park's affective surveying

ii. Park and the picturesque

Chapter 6 "Like is an ill mark": Smollett, Park, and the perseverance of the Scottish picaresque in James Hogg's Confessions

i. Smollett and park revisited

ii. "The Shadow and the substance": the heroic picaro

iii. Robert and the end of the picaresque

Epilogue " Female Ulysses": The picaresque and reconfigurations of "home" in Mary Seacole's Wonderful adventures

i. Seacole and the picaresque across the Caribbean and London

ii. "Blue hills," "blue waters," and "blue sky"

Bibliography

Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	11.2.2025
Reihe/Serie	Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment ; 2025:02
Verlagsort	Liverpool
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Historische Romane
	Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
ISBN-10	1-80207-206-3 / 1802072063
ISBN-13	978-1-80207-206-8 / 9781802072068
Zustand	Neuware