Why were Scottish writers able to dominate the field of periodical literature throughout the nineteenth-century? Barton Swaim's Scottish Men of Letters and the New Public Sphere, 1802-1834 attempts an answer to that question by examining the period when the Scots' dominance was at its height: the three decades after the founding of the Edinburgh Review in 1802. In this carefully researched and thoughtful study, Swaim discusses the ways in which four writers in the vanguard of Scottish periodical-writing—Francis Jeffrey, John Wilson, John Gibson Lockhart, and Thomas Carlyle—exemplify the historical and cultural dynamics that occasioned Scottish dominance of what Jürgen Habermas would later call the public sphere.