- Department of English
Temple University
1114 W. Polett Walk
Anderson Hall, 10th Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19122 - 215 204 1796
Steve Newman
Temple University, English, Faculty Member
- English Literature, Romanticism, Eighteenth-Century British History and Culture, Scottish Literature, Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature, 18th Century Scottish Literature, and 28 moreAdam Smith, Philosophy of Value, Humanities, History of Education, History of Universities, English, History of Medicine, History of English Literature, Medical Humanities, Eighteenth-Century literature, Professional Writing, Lyric poetry, Scottish Enlightenment, Ballads, Professionalization, Economics and Literature, South Sea Bubble, Allan Ramsay, Medical School, Admissions Essays, Digital Humanities, British Romanticism, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Literature, Scottish Studies, Robert Burns, Chinese Studies, Chinese minorities, and History and theory of literary genresedit
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Abstract:'Hodden-gray' appears at key moments in Allan Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd (1725) and his other works, including A Collection of Scots Proverbs (1737). By tracing this figure of homespun rusticity in Ramsay and texts... more
Abstract:'Hodden-gray' appears at key moments in Allan Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd (1725) and his other works, including A Collection of Scots Proverbs (1737). By tracing this figure of homespun rusticity in Ramsay and texts from a seventeenth-century manual for colonising New Jersey to Burns's 'Is There For Honest Poverty' to the London Scottish regiment, this essay shows how Ramsay's remediation of a range of forms and practices – pastoral, Second Sight, songs, and proverbs – at once confirms and questions our models of Enlightenment within the terrain of an imperfectly United Kingdom.
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This essay shows how in _The Gentle Shepherd_ Allan Ramsay engages in the complex work of "pastoral improvement" on an individual and national scale and foresees--to a point--how his work will be received in the decades and even centuries... more
This essay shows how in _The Gentle Shepherd_ Allan Ramsay engages in the complex work of "pastoral improvement" on an individual and national scale and foresees--to a point--how his work will be received in the decades and even centuries to come. After situating his work within the uprising of the Galloway Levellers, pastoral, and the early work of agricultural improvement, I consider how the concept of improvement shapes the reception of his work in the Linley-Tickell production of the 1780s--including a surprising appearance from the Shakespearean forger, William Henry Ireland--and the key role _The Gentle Shepherd_ plays in "The Young West-Indian," a story by Lydia Maria Child, one of the most influential authors in the United States during the 19th century. These case studies help to establish _The Gentle Shepherd_ as the most major of minor texts in that hybrid thing called eighteenth-century British literature, bringing together music, image, and text to imagine and question the idea and practice of improvement for individuals and nations.
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Abstract ‘Hodden-gray’ appears at key moments in Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd (1725; 1729) and his other works, including A Collection of Scots Proverbs (1737). By tracing this figure of homespun rusticity in Ramsay and texts from a... more
Abstract
‘Hodden-gray’ appears at key moments in Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle
Shepherd (1725; 1729) and his other works, including A Collection of Scots Proverbs (1737). By tracing this figure of homespun rusticity in
Ramsay and texts from a seventeenth-century manual for colonising
New Jersey to Burns’s ‘Is There For Honest Poverty’ to the
London Scottish regiment, this essay shows how Ramsay’s remediation
of a range of forms and practices--pastoral, Second Sight,
songs, and proverbs--at once confirms and questions our models of
Enlightenment within the terrain of an imperfectly United Kingdom.
This essay appears in _The Scottish Literary Review_ 10:1 (Spring/Summer 2018)
‘Hodden-gray’ appears at key moments in Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle
Shepherd (1725; 1729) and his other works, including A Collection of Scots Proverbs (1737). By tracing this figure of homespun rusticity in
Ramsay and texts from a seventeenth-century manual for colonising
New Jersey to Burns’s ‘Is There For Honest Poverty’ to the
London Scottish regiment, this essay shows how Ramsay’s remediation
of a range of forms and practices--pastoral, Second Sight,
songs, and proverbs--at once confirms and questions our models of
Enlightenment within the terrain of an imperfectly United Kingdom.
This essay appears in _The Scottish Literary Review_ 10:1 (Spring/Summer 2018)
Research Interests: Scottish Literature, Eighteenth-Century literature, Proverbs, Scottish History, Scottish Enlightenment, and 5 moreEighteenth-Century British History and Culture, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Literature, Scottish music, and Eighteenth-Century Music
This is a version of a longer essay that will appear in the next year, published in _The Bottle Imp_. For the rest of the issue, see: http://asls.arts.gla.ac.uk/SWE/TBI/TBISupp/TBISupp4/Andrews.html
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This paper is a revised draft of a paper I delivered at the conference for the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of Delaware in November of 2014. In it, I argue that a close reading of... more
This paper is a revised draft of a paper I delivered at the conference for the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of Delaware in November of 2014.
In it, I argue that a close reading of Smith's late and unfinished essay on imitation in the arts within the context of his time registers an ambivalence toward the aesthetic. And that ambivalence, in turn, points to ties and tensions among these various spheres of valuation—aesthetics is at once foundational to political economy and the politics of state, and yet its seductive force means it must also be separated from these discourses, moral philosophy in particular. These ties and tensions emerge most clearly when Smith draws a distinction between “time” (rhythm) and “tune” (melody), allying the former with “primitive” and the latter with more refined music. This involves Smith in imagining how the division of labor, that mighty engine of the wealth of nations, conditions the possibilities for making and appreciating art. It also involves him in the sticky debates over authenticity bound up in “primitive” song that emerge with the Ballad Revival of the eighteenth century. A sign of the pressure exerted by primitive song is that it moves him to invoke his own experience in a way that is to my knowledge unique in his work, as he remembers changes in Scots tunes and recalls an African doing a frightening war-dance, an irruption of the personal and the primitive in the midst of polite modern philosophizing. Finally, thinking about the move from “time” to “tune” produces odd conceptual effects. “Time” would seem to be the most abstract, the most systematic way of thinking about music, and indeed Smith’s own economic theory depends upon the abstraction of time in labor. But in this essay “time” turns out to resist such abstraction in multiple registers, through its material embodiment as primitive beat, its constitutive role within a specific narrative of civilization, and the uncertainty it causes in grasping imitation itself—is the ballad’s refrain of “derry-derry-down” music imitating speech or vice versa? Late in his own career but early in the historiography of economic and social improvement, Smith reminds us of the constructedness of time and the interests that construct it various ways. His own construction of time and tune challenges recent accounts of his work, though valuable in their own way, as complicit in an aesthetics that is suspiciously analogous to commodity exchange (McKeon) or that inscribes social inequality “endemic to the division of labor that is crucial to producing the wealth of modern nations” (Chandler) or which divorces aesthetics completely from the discourse of taste, preferring instead the idea of price as an expression of preference (de Marchi).
In it, I argue that a close reading of Smith's late and unfinished essay on imitation in the arts within the context of his time registers an ambivalence toward the aesthetic. And that ambivalence, in turn, points to ties and tensions among these various spheres of valuation—aesthetics is at once foundational to political economy and the politics of state, and yet its seductive force means it must also be separated from these discourses, moral philosophy in particular. These ties and tensions emerge most clearly when Smith draws a distinction between “time” (rhythm) and “tune” (melody), allying the former with “primitive” and the latter with more refined music. This involves Smith in imagining how the division of labor, that mighty engine of the wealth of nations, conditions the possibilities for making and appreciating art. It also involves him in the sticky debates over authenticity bound up in “primitive” song that emerge with the Ballad Revival of the eighteenth century. A sign of the pressure exerted by primitive song is that it moves him to invoke his own experience in a way that is to my knowledge unique in his work, as he remembers changes in Scots tunes and recalls an African doing a frightening war-dance, an irruption of the personal and the primitive in the midst of polite modern philosophizing. Finally, thinking about the move from “time” to “tune” produces odd conceptual effects. “Time” would seem to be the most abstract, the most systematic way of thinking about music, and indeed Smith’s own economic theory depends upon the abstraction of time in labor. But in this essay “time” turns out to resist such abstraction in multiple registers, through its material embodiment as primitive beat, its constitutive role within a specific narrative of civilization, and the uncertainty it causes in grasping imitation itself—is the ballad’s refrain of “derry-derry-down” music imitating speech or vice versa? Late in his own career but early in the historiography of economic and social improvement, Smith reminds us of the constructedness of time and the interests that construct it various ways. His own construction of time and tune challenges recent accounts of his work, though valuable in their own way, as complicit in an aesthetics that is suspiciously analogous to commodity exchange (McKeon) or that inscribes social inequality “endemic to the division of labor that is crucial to producing the wealth of modern nations” (Chandler) or which divorces aesthetics completely from the discourse of taste, preferring instead the idea of price as an expression of preference (de Marchi).
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This is a final draft of a chapter in Evan Gottlieb, ed., _Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760-1820 (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850)_, (Bucknell UP, 2014). This essay inquires into the... more
This is a final draft of a chapter in Evan Gottlieb, ed., _Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760-1820 (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850)_, (Bucknell UP, 2014).
This essay inquires into the ways Burns' idea of the songs he writes, rewrites, and collects are or are not analogous to Enlightenment ideas of "improvement." By setting Burns' use of the term "localize" in his notes on Scottish song next to Wollstonecraft's use of the term in _Vindication of the Rights of Women_ and Sir John Sinclair's in _The Statistical Account of Scotland_, this essay shows how for Burns songs are at once too "sticky," too tied to locality, and "too slippery," too mobile, for analogies of improvement to offer anything more than provisional comparisons. More broadly, the essay asks at what point an insistence on the particular—say, a particular locality in a song—passes from a moment in the Enlightenment subsumption of the particular into the general into a particularity that questions that very process?
Answering this question requires us to go beyond Burns' own thoughts on his songs and consider them in a wider field of circulation; in this essay, I focus on Burns' many appearances in _The Calcutta Journal_ (edited by the radical James Silk Buckingham. The Burns who emerges in its pages is multivalent, attesting to the slipperiness and stickiness of his songs as they pulse through imperial networks: a prophet of worldwide reform and perhaps even revolution; a conservative symbol of Scottish solidarity and British superiority; and a figure of powerful affect rooted in Scotland but accessible to all, including non-Anglo Indians looking to throw off the British yoke. But he also becomes a sign of the emergence of the literary as a discourse irreducible to any particular politics. Thinking about Burns in India thus helps to clarify the global potentialities of Romanticism and the degree to which they are realized.
This essay inquires into the ways Burns' idea of the songs he writes, rewrites, and collects are or are not analogous to Enlightenment ideas of "improvement." By setting Burns' use of the term "localize" in his notes on Scottish song next to Wollstonecraft's use of the term in _Vindication of the Rights of Women_ and Sir John Sinclair's in _The Statistical Account of Scotland_, this essay shows how for Burns songs are at once too "sticky," too tied to locality, and "too slippery," too mobile, for analogies of improvement to offer anything more than provisional comparisons. More broadly, the essay asks at what point an insistence on the particular—say, a particular locality in a song—passes from a moment in the Enlightenment subsumption of the particular into the general into a particularity that questions that very process?
Answering this question requires us to go beyond Burns' own thoughts on his songs and consider them in a wider field of circulation; in this essay, I focus on Burns' many appearances in _The Calcutta Journal_ (edited by the radical James Silk Buckingham. The Burns who emerges in its pages is multivalent, attesting to the slipperiness and stickiness of his songs as they pulse through imperial networks: a prophet of worldwide reform and perhaps even revolution; a conservative symbol of Scottish solidarity and British superiority; and a figure of powerful affect rooted in Scotland but accessible to all, including non-Anglo Indians looking to throw off the British yoke. But he also becomes a sign of the emergence of the literary as a discourse irreducible to any particular politics. Thinking about Burns in India thus helps to clarify the global potentialities of Romanticism and the degree to which they are realized.
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This is a review from the Fall 2017 issue of Eighreenth-Century Studies of Mike Hill and Warren Montag, _The Other Adam Smith_ (Stanford UP, 2014). This is a challenging, daring, and innovative book; although I raise some questions about... more
This is a review from the Fall 2017 issue of Eighreenth-Century Studies of Mike Hill and Warren Montag, _The Other Adam Smith_ (Stanford UP, 2014). This is a challenging, daring, and innovative book; although I raise some questions about approach and method, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Smith or in the intertwining of eighteenth-century philosophy and its historical moment.
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Given the lucidity of Sandro Jung's book, it is not surprising that he makes it easy for the reader to find its animating purpose: The expressed aim of this book is to change Mallet's historical and critical fate and read him... more
Given the lucidity of Sandro Jung's book, it is not surprising that he makes it easy for the reader to find its animating purpose: The expressed aim of this book is to change Mallet's historical and critical fate and read him againas his eighteenth century peers didas a man who ...
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This is a review of Martha Redbone's excellent cd, published in _Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly_ (Summer 2015)
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Allan Ramsay is a re-mediator par excellence. He transforms a complex archive of Scottish forms and practices—from mock-elegy to Second Sight to songs and proverbs—into a wide-ranging body of work that seeks at once to preserve the... more
Allan Ramsay is a re-mediator par excellence. He transforms a complex archive of Scottish forms and practices—from mock-elegy to Second Sight to songs and proverbs—into a wide-ranging body of work that seeks at once to preserve the specificity of Scotland in an Anglo-centric, post-Union world while also embracing, though not uncritically, a future marked by “improvement,” that master-term of the Enlightenment lexicon. In what follows, I want to trace how he does this by moving briefly through a few separate archives that speak to the composition and reception of The Gentle Shepherd and that point to larger questions about how archives are assembled and used and what we might mean by mediation and re-mediation.
N. B. Some of the images referred to in the talk do not appear in the text because permission to publish has not yet been obtained.
N. B. Some of the images referred to in the talk do not appear in the text because permission to publish has not yet been obtained.