Edinburgh was in many ways, as Ian Duncan asserts in this monumental new book, the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’ and Scott's Shadow substantiates this claim both in the way the city was the site of an explosion of cultural production, and in the way Edinburgh become a trope for or model of civic organization itself. Duncan argues that a city that become commonly known as the ‘Modern Athens’ was the focal point of a debate about civic nationalism moving from ‘an oligarchic and republican idea of citizenship based civic virtue’ (born of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy) to an ‘aesthetically based cultural nationalism’ promoted by the new culture of the literary magazine.

Once established as a synecdoche for the nation, Edinburgh speaks for Scotland (and, in complex ways, Britain) both as a representative figure and as a publishing centre; culture itself becomes a form of political, commercial and social activity, conferring a national identity that speaks the language of aesthetics. In nineteenth-century Britain, Scotland's national distinctiveness cannot take the form of explicit political independence, but becomes the cultural supplement (often figured as lost or archaic) to contemporary politics and in turn starts to take on the discourses of the political. In a compelling chapter on the architecture of Edinburgh, Duncan shows how the appearance of the city itself, its increasingly renowned beauty and sublimity, becomes a way of figuring the triumphs of Britain in a post-Napoleonic world – the viewer is instructed to see the modern civic architecture (including the never-completed National Monument to Britain's 1815 victory) as a triumph of imperial ideology set in, and underpinned by, the timeless or archaic order of the city's natural background.

Cities are, of course, states of mind as well as bricks and mortar, and the bulk of the book is about Edinburgh's role in the production of this culture, and particularly its dominant genre (both in Scotland and in Europe), the novel. Duncan dexterously manages the difficult task of linking the history of publishing with the history of ideas, interweaving the story of literary Edinburgh with an account of the fiction that emerged from it. The key figure here is the philosopher David Hume, whose theorizing of the imagination as a ‘novelistic’ mode of experience in its ability to render common life underscores the historical novel's challenge to ‘factual’ history. In an exceptionally detailed study, Duncan describes the dynamic relation between Edinburgh's highly politicized literary magazines and the history of the novel, showing how they collaborate both with each other and with institutions of education, philosophy and the law to constitute a ‘republic of letters’. The early chapters give a lucid account of the relation between party politics and the drive to influence reading (both of novels and the city itself) in the powerful magazines and publishing houses of early nineteenth-century Edinburgh. The book reveals how apparent single positions, like the city of Edinburgh, can produce world views – in this case, the Scottish Enlightenment ideas that a global vision is possible in the first place – that challenge the sense of Edinburgh's provincial status.

Edinburgh is already fixed at the apogee of Enlightenment stadial history, the very pinnacle of progress with commercial success driving a sophisticated leisure economy. But the literature produced in Edinburgh was not all itself urban. In fact, one of the functions of the city was to provide a regional, as well as a national, centre for rural Scotland. In a marvellous chapter on Scott's Rob Roy, Duncan supplies a detailed literary example of his earlier thoughts on the relation between an ancient national past and a modern political economy, and the way these meet in the cultural form of the novel. Rob Roy shows how an adventure into the archaic world of rural Highland Scotland is also a capitalist venture where the ‘primitive’ impulses of feuding, freebooting natives are precisely what is needed in the modern commercial city, rooted in the economic theory of Adam Smith.

The second part of the book explores novelists who were aware they were writing in Scott's very long and wide shadow. Duncan shows, for example, how John Galt's experiments with different forms of narrative constitute an ideological dialogue with Scott's model of the historical romance and its claims for truth status. Particularly impressive here is Duncan's careful untangling of the literary games James Hogg played with the idea of a single cultural metropolis and its authority, challenging the ascendancy of literary Edinburgh and its coterie of opinion-formers. Duncan roots Hogg's famously slippery texts in the very precise circumstances of the circulation of both texts and reputations in literary Edinburgh. The book offers a particularly rich and dense account of Hogg, providing a very comprehensive literary and philosophical context that complements the new material and publishing circumstances of his works uncovered by the ongoing Stirling/South Carolina edition of Hogg's complete writing.

Scott's Shadow is a very considerable book indeed, covering a great deal more ground than a short review can adumbrate. Equally learned and imaginative, the book manages both to offer a sophisticated and wholly original account of the idea of a national culture, while maintaining a rigorous and scholarly account of how the multiple strands of this national debate were rooted in the commercial and political world of Edinburgh. To take just one example of many, J.G. Lockhart, usually glossed over as a straightforward purveyor of information about Walter Scott, is shrewdly targeted as a key broker in cultural capital. The book's range is panoramic, but in its sustained focus on both the work and the myth of Scott it gives a compelling account of a single place and time. ‘Romantic Edinburgh’ is shown to occupy a very large part of British Romanticism as a whole and Duncan's work decisively turns our sense of the period towards Scotland, the novel, and the work of history, rather than the Coleridgean centring of the imagination that tends to be used as shorthand for ‘Romanticism’. This is a demanding book that requires careful attention, but it is a groundbreaking work that will alter our sense of literary history, as well as of nineteenth-century Edinburgh, for years to come.