John Locke asked, "since all things that exist are merely particulars, how come we by general terms?" Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-Scottish Literature, 1603-1832 tells a story about aesthetics and politics that looks back to the 1603 Union of Crowns and James VI/I's emigration from Edinburgh to London. Considering the emergence of British unionism alongside the literary rise of both description and "the individual," Rivka Swenson builds on extant scholarship with original close readings that illuminate the inheritances of 1603, a date of considerable but untraced...