In the final pages of Scott's Shadow, Ian Duncan stages Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus as a signpost marking the end of an Edinburgh post-Enlightenment literary culture dominated by Walter Scott's historical novels. To fully appreciate the transitional position of Carlyle's work, Duncan argues, it is imperative to reconstruct the ‘Scottish genealogy’ that has been obscured by the almost exclusive critical emphasis on ‘the Anglo-Irish and German traditions Carlyle himself alludes to’. Duncan is by no means the first to posit Sartor Resartus at the end of the Romantic period, nor to foreground its Scottish context. However, his observation that the critical neglect of the latter repeats ‘the work's own, programmatic suppression of its local literary circumstances’ suggests the need for a re-interrogation of the peculiar self-reflexivity of Sartor Resartus, which has traditionally been approached in terms of (Romantic or deconstructionist) irony. The partial restoration of Sartor's Scottish context has led to philosophical reassessments of the work as an antithesis to Scott's historical romances or in relation to the Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Equally important has been the recovery of its relation to late-Romantic periodical culture. Duncan, for example, traces back Sartor's ‘formal and stylistic, mixed-metaphorical heterogeneity’ to its original serial publication in Fraser's Magazine (between November 1833 and August 1834) and, by extension, to the magazine culture of the 1820s:

Mark Parker's more elaborate re-evaluation of Sartor Resartus sees it as a ‘culmination of … the innovative and flexible essay fostered in the literary magazines of the 1820s’ that ‘completes the first phase of British periodical literature in the nineteenth century’ and chimes with Duncan's recontextualisation of the work in late-Romantic Scottish periodical culture. Both invite a critical return to Carlyle's active engagement with this culture in the 1820s.

While Carlyle's early essays have mainly been studied in terms of his emergence as ‘the Voice of Germany’, recent scholarship on the genre of the Romantic essay allows for a critical reappraisal of their dynamic and essentially ambivalent interaction with their immediate context of publication.