Dane Anderson Humanities
From Enlightenment to Romance: Adam Fergusons Philosophy of History in Scottish Romantic Literature
In preparation for his senior honors thesis, Dane is studying the relationship between literatures of the Scottish Enlightenment and Romantic periods. Specifically, he is exploring how Adam Fergusons theory of history, described in the Essay on the History of Civil Society, colors major texts of Scottish Romanticism. The scholarship surrounding Fergusons work has focused on its political and sociological implications, but there has not yet been any major study of Fergusons relationship to Scottish Romanticism. Through close reading and archival research in Edinburgh, Scotland, Dane will fill this gap by tracing characteristic elements of Fergusons Essayits communitarian orientation, its republican critiques of commerce, and its ambivalent attitude towards progressin the novels of Walter Scott, John Galt, and James Hogg, and the poetry of James Macphereson and Robert Burns.
