This book is about Enlightenment ideas of "character." It argues for their central importance in eighteenth-century thought and culture. The scope of this volume extends well beyond the confines of literary history. It examines discussions of race, nation, the self, virtue, sociability, and historical progress. The specially commissioned essays in this volume are the first, collectively, to address the broader significance of Enlightenment "character," and to do so from an interdisciplinary perspective. The focus is on the Scottish Enlightenment, but contributors (...) consider these debates in their international contexts and in relation to parallel developments in Britain, Europe, and America. (shrink)

This chapter considers political, psychological, and grammatical forms of connection and their implications for narrative analogies between self and nation developed in relation to the 1707 Union between England and Scotland, and the confederation of the United States in 1776. Reid's and Beattie's ‘refutations’ of Hume propagate the structural tension in his epistemological argument into the assumptions of Common Sense philosophy. Some implications for imaginative literature of tensions between coherent stories and fragmented form are explored in the example of William (...) Duff's History of Rhedi and the work of Henry Mackenzie. Similar issues of style and self-consciousness about language use are discussed in relation to the prose of the American Founders. (shrink)