Unteachable Lessons: Why Wisdom Can't Be Taught (and Why That's Okay) by Carl Mccolman

Unteachable Lessons: Why Wisdom Can't Be Taught (and Why That's Okay) by Carl Mccolman

Scott's Shadow is the first comprehensive account of the flowering of Scottish fiction between 1802 and 1832, when post-Enlightenment Edinburgh rivaled London as a center for literary and cultural innovation. Ian Duncan shows how Walter Scott became the central figure in these developments, and how he helped redefine the novel as the principal modern genre for the representation of national historical life.

Duncan traces the rise of a cultural nationalist ideology and the ascendancy of Scott's Waverley novels in the years after Waterloo. He argues that the key to Scott's achievement and its unprecedented impact was the actualization of a realist aesthetic of fiction, one that offered a socializing model of the imagination as first theorized by Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume. This aesthetic, Duncan contends, provides a powerful novelistic alternative to the Kantian-Coleridgean account of the imagination that has been taken as normative for British Romanticism since the early twentieth century. Duncan goes on to examine in detail how other Scottish writers inspired by Scott's innovations--James Hogg and John Galt in particular--produced in their own novels and tales rival accounts of regional, national, and imperial history.

Scott's Shadow illuminates a major but neglected episode of British Romanticism as well as a pivotal moment in the history and development of the novel.

Carl McColman is a contemplative writer, storyteller, podcaster, and spiritual director. He is a life-professed member of a Lay Cistercian community under the spiritual guidance of Trappist monks. He is the author of numerous books, including The Big Book of Christian Mysticism, and regularly speaks and leads retreats on topics related to Christian mysticism, Celtic spirituality, and interfaith dialogue. Carl and his wife, artist Fran McColman, live near Atlanta, Georgia.