The Cultural Memory of Georgian Glasgow - by Craig Lamont (Paperback)

About the Book

The first interdisciplinary exploration of eighteenth-century Glasgow

Book Synopsis

This book provides a long overdue reading of Scotland's largest city as it was during the long eighteenth century. These formative years of Enlightenment, caught between the tumultuous ages of the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, cast Glasgow in a new and vibrant light. Far from being a dusty metropolis lying in wait for the famous age of shipbuilding, Glasgow was already an imperial hub: as implicated in mass migration and slavery as it was in civic growth and social progression. Craig Lamont incorporates case studies such as the Scottish Enlightenment, the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Eighteenth Century Print Culture to investigate how the city was shaped by the emergence of new trades and new ventures in philosophy, fine art, science, and religion. The book merges historical, literary and memory studies to provide an original blueprint for new research into other cities or civic spaces.

From the Back Cover

This book provides a much overdue reading of Scotland's largest city as it was during the long 18th century. These formative years of Enlightenment, caught between the tumultuous ages of the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, cast Glasgow in a new and vibrant light. Far from being a dusty metropolis lying in wait for the famous age of shipbuilding, Glasgow was already an imperial hub - as implicated in mass migration and slavery as it was in civic growth and social progression. Craig Lamont incorporates case studies such as the Scottish Enlightenment, the transatlantic slave trade and 18th-century print culture to investigate how the city was shaped by the emergence of new trades and new ventures in philosophy, fine art, science and religion. The book merges historical, literary and memory studies to provide an original blueprint for new research into other cities or civic spaces. Craig Lamont is a Research Associate at the University of Glasgow, working on two major ongoing AHRC-funded projects: Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century (PI: Gerard Carruthers) and The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay (PI: Murray Pittock). He completed his Ross Roy Medal-winning PhD in 2015.

About the Author

Craig Lamont is Lecturer in Scottish Studies at the University of Glasgow. He specialises in print culture, textual editing, and memory studies across a range of Scottish subjects and writers. Lamont is author of The Cultural Memory of Georgian Glasgow (2021), co-editor of The Scottish Rebellion: Insurrection 1820 (2022), and co-editor of Allan Ramsay's Future: Studies in Scottish Literature (2020). He has published on Scottish literature, bibliography, and memory studies, and he is co-editor of the Oxford University Press edition of Robert Burns's Correspondence.