Introduction

Abstract

As its title indicates, the concept linking the chapters in this book is that of the ‘debatable land’. The phrase is first recorded in the sixteenth century in the specific context of the Anglo-Scottish border. It remained the possession of lawyers, historians and map-makers until made more widely known by Walter Scott in the early nineteenth century. Thereafter the term ‘debatable’ came to be used to describe not only the Anglo-Scottish border but other disputed territories and, by metaphorical extension, disputes of other sorts, social, intellectual or artistic. It is, therefore, an appropriate concept to use to focus attention on certain aspects of writing in English in the Romantic period, roughly 1780–1830. In this collection of seventeen chapters, about half allude to the term ‘debatable lands’ in its geographical or literal sense; the others show the metaphorical extensions to which it now readily lends itself. The chapters are principally about the literature of Britain and Ireland. As that literature, however, incorporated the overseas experience gained in the course of travel, trade, war, and colonial expansion, the subject-matter is not confined to these islands, and the collection is divided into two parts, headed ‘Britain and Ireland’ and ‘Europe and Beyond’.