Ian Duncan. Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-691-04383-8. Price: US$39.50.

The scholarship on and around Scott is the most distinguished of any novelist of the century. Ian Duncan’s powerful Scott’s Shadow follows (among others) Judith Wilt’s Secret Leaves (1985), Ina Ferris’s Achievement of Literary Authority (1991), Fiona Robertson’s Legitimate Histories (1994), Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism (1997), Miranda Burgess’s British Fiction and the Production of Social Order (2000), and Susan Manning’s Fragments of Union (2002), along with earlier books, additional brilliant work partly about Scott and his milieu, and more on the way from Juliet Shields, Samuel Baker, and doubtless others. No one, I dare say, has cast so illuminating a searchlight on so many sometimes dusty corners as Duncan. In ten chapters and forty-six subchapters he dissects Hume, Smith, and Reid (along with bits of Blair, Burke, and Stewart); the leading magazines; Lockhart and John Wilson (who emerges as a major figure); Brunton, Ferrier, Galt, Hogg, Christian Johnstone (de facto the first woman to edit a major periodical and author of a novel “unfamiliar even to specialists” [291] along with a very successful Scott pastiche in the guise of a cookery book), Carlyle, and a lot of Scott--with side glances at Edgeworth, Owenson, Austen (two beautiful pages on “nothing” in Emma), and numerous others. The guiding thread, sketched in the Preface and underwritten by Bourdieu, is a dissent from a “zero-sum accounting” of literary achievements (p. xv). Duncan formulates it late in the book as follows: “Galt’s complaints about the constraints of the market have led commentators to underestimate or ignore the ways in which dominant conventions, and the force of Scott’s example, constituted a creative challenge rather than a prohibition” (223). While this thesis remains rather horizonal in the book, it does imply a characteristically generous response to disparagers of either Scott or his fascinating lesser contemporaries. The first half undertakes portraits of the modern Edinburgh of the magazines in relation to commerce, politics, and letters; of the numerous facets of nationalism (antique and modern, eccentric and normalizing, progressive and nostalgic) in relation to and tension with London; and of the mutual entanglements of fiction and history. The second half profiles the more prominent and successful novelists in and out of dialogue with Scott--overshadowed but also sometimes shaded and protected by him--and with one another. The cultural imagination and the fictional imagination are hardly separable, however, and the cast of writers and books remains dense and overlapping throughout. Auxiliary topics--by no means all of them noted in the inadequate index--include authenticity, intertextuality, masculinity, noncontemporaneity, spatialization, empiricism, realism, taste, aestheticism, romance, pastoral, primitivism, post-modernity, friendship, sentimentalism, the uncanny, incorporation and introjection (via Abraham and Torok), galvanism, magical realism, allegory, metaphor and metonymy, patriarchy, fanaticism, gothicism, speech and writing, dialect, and conversion narratives, not to mention the Caledonian Antisyzygy. It is as breathless as it sounds. Duncan’s preface says, “it has taken me far longer to write this book than it should have” (p. xvi). I don’t know about the should have, given the daunting reading list--and even Duncan concedes that two of the thirteen Galt novels he encompasses (plus a number of non-fiction works) are “tedious” (220)--but one feels the struggle. Duncan’s Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (1992) and his many essays are intricate, but not as intricate as Scott’s Shadow. Still, readers of these earlier works will be aware that Duncan is incapable of writing a paragraph without assembling pinpoint details in the service of original ideas, and the abstraction quotient is far higher in the new book. He marries Wilt’s density and some of her Freudianism, though only rare …