Dialectics of Improvement

Gerard Lee McKeever is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow.

• Introduction1. Robert Burns and ‘Circling Time’2. Short Fictions of Improvement by James Hogg and Walter Scott3. ‘The Great Moral Object’ in Joanna Baillie’s Drama4. The Story of John Galt’s Scottish NovelsCoda: ‘There is no end to machinery’Bibliography

Dialectics of Improvement is a wonderfully insightful study of the interrelated currents of Enlightenment and Romanticism in Scottish literature. Covering commercial, religious, technological, aesthetic, moral, political, educational and scientific "improvement", it reveals how contested this concept was and how important it continues to be for our understanding of the period.