English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 is the first comprehensive historical survey of fiction from that period for many decades. It combines a clear awareness of the period's social history with recent developments in literary criticism, theory and history, and explains the astounding variety of forms in Romantic fiction in terms of the various cultural, political, social, regional and gender conflicts of the time. It provides a broad-ranging survey from the major authors and works through to the sub-genres of the period. Jan Austin and Sir Alter Scott are discussed alongside the Gothic Romance, political and feminist fiction, social satire and regional, rural and historical novels. It also provides a comparison of the methods of distribution and marketing and the availability of books then and now; examines cheap popular fiction and children's fiction, and considers the recent debate about the place of prose fiction in a Romantic literature hitherto dominated by poetry.

This book participates in the modern recovery of the memory of the long-forgotten relationship between Scotland and the Caribbean. Drawing on theoretical paradigms of world literature and transnationalism, it argues that Caribbean slavery profoundly shaped Scotland’s economic, social and cultural development, and draws out the implications for current debates on Scotland’s national narratives of identity. Eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Scottish writers are re-examined in this new light. Morris explores the ways that discourses of "improvement" in both Scotland and the Caribbean are mediated by the modes of pastoral and georgic which struggle to explain and contain the labour conditions of agricultural labourers, both free and enslaved. The ambivalent relationship of Scottish writers, including Robert Burns, to questions around abolition allows fresh perspectives on the era. Furthermore, Morris considers the origins of a hybrid Scottish-Creole identity through two nineteenth-century figures - Robert Wedderburn and Mary Seacole. The final chapter moves forward to consider the implications for post-devolution (post-referendum) Scotland. Underpinning this investigation is the conviction that collective memory is a key feature which shapes behaviour and beliefs in the present; the recovery of the memory of slavery is performed here in the interests of social justice in the present.