Scottish Romanticism, Evangelicalism and Robert Pollok'sThe Course of Time(1827)

Abstract

The recent revival of interest in Scottish Romanticism has returned to the question of the particularities of national public spheres in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and to the role of religion in the construction of these public spheres. The issues are certainly pressing. Throughout the period, religious themes were generally more important to Scottish writers than they were to their English contemporaries, and Scottish religion functioned and was structured in ways quite distinct from the varieties of English religiosity with which historians and especially literary critics are often most familiar. Recent work on religion and Scottish Romanticism has drawn attention to these contexts and to the complex series of relationships between religion and writing in the period. This work has initiated a reconsideration of religion’s role and effect on literary writing. There are critical benefits to be gained from this kind of effort, as has been illustrated in scholarship on Hazlitt, for example, which has demonstrated the value