This work explores the political relationship between Scotland and England as it was negotiated in the literary realm in the century after the 1707 Act of Union. It examines Britain, one of the precursors to the modern nation and as a dynamic process and a dialogue between heterogeneous elements.

Chapter 4 reads William Wordsworth s renegotiation of Robert Burns s work after the Scottish poet s death as illustrative of the contest for control of the British cultural realm at the end of the eighteenth century. Chapter 5 argues that in his 1830 republication of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Walter Scott imagines alternative histories of Britain and of English literature through his negotiations with Thomas Percy and his Scottish predecessors Macpherson and Burns.

Introduction
1. Writing the nation in 1707: Daniel Defoe, Lord Belhaven and the 'vast conjunction' of Britain
2. Narrating the '45: Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett and the pretense of fiction
3. Origin of the specious: James Macpherson, Samuel Johnson and the forging of the nation
4. The poetry of nature and the nature of poetry: Robert Burns and William Wordsworth
5. Citing the nation: Thomas Percy's and Walter Scott's minstrel ballads
Conclusion: Runes of empire: Scotland and the margins of English literature
' Notes
Bibliography
Index.