What did it mean to be British, and more specifically to feel British, in the century following the Parliamentary Union of Scotland and England? Juliet Shields departs from recent accounts of the Romantic emergence of nationalism by recovering the terms in which eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century writers understood nationhood. She argues that, in the wake of the turmoil surrounding the Union, Scottish writers appealed to sentiment, or refined feeling, to imagine the nation as a community. They sought to transform a Great Britain united by political and economic interests into one united by shared sympathies, even while they used the gendered and racial connotations of sentiment to differentiate sharply between Scottish, English, and British identities. By moving Scotland from the margins to the center of literary history, the book explores how sentiment shaped both the development of British identity and the literature within which writers responded creatively to the idea of nationhood.

This essay reassesses James Fenimore Cooper's literary relationship to Walter Scott by examining the depiction of Scots in The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Prairie (1827). Read as companion texts, these novels represent the imperial migrations of Scots as a cause of Native Americans' unfortunate, but for Cooper seemingly inevitable, eradication. They also trace the development of an American identity that incorporates feudal chivalry and savage fortitude and that is formed through cultural appropriation rather than racial mixing. The Last of the Mohicans' Scottish protagonist, Duncan Heyward, learns to survive in the northeastern wilderness by adopting the Mohicans' savage self-control as a complement to his own feudal chivalry; in turn, The Prairie's Paul Hover equips himself for the challenges of westward expansion by adopting both the remnants of this chivalry and the exilic adaptability and colonial striving that Cooper accords to Scots. I suggest that the cultural appropriation through which Heyward and Hover achieve an American identity that incorporates Scottish chivalry and savage self-command offers a model for the literary relationship between Cooper's and Scott's historical romances. The Leatherstocking Tales borrow selectively from the Waverely Novels, rejecting their valorization of feudal chivalry while incorporating their representation of cultural appropriation as a mechanism of teleological social development.

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