Scottish Studies International – serie

This is an intellectual biography of the early life and missionary career of James Legge (1815-1897), a monumental figure in 19th century European sinology. In the first volume details about Legge’s family, religious setting, and educational experiences in northeastern Scotland are shown to anchor his intellectual interests, shaping his later religious transformation and commitment to Chinese missionary work. The trials, adjustments and initial missionary strategies of the Legge family’s first years in Malacca and the new colony of Hongkong (1840-1848) bring this volume to a close. In the second volume the flourishing of Legge’s missionary scholarship is cast in the context of his application of «principles» of Scottish Nonconformism and Scottish realist philosophy to many unexpected aspects of the Hongkong and Chinese contexts. While his sinological scholarship has weathered more than a century of criticism and neglect, Legge’s unexpected emergence into roles as a Scottish Nonconformist prophet and counter-cultural folk hero in Hongkong reveal new dimensions of Protestant missions in China which challenge standard Orientalist interpretations of cultural imperialism.

This book sets out to explore the reception of Scotland’s best-loved writer Robert Burns in Germany, beginning with Burns’s contemporaries in a German state and at a time when instant international fame of foreign writers was yet to develop. The author traces Burns’s growing popularity and, for instance, demonstrates how a single line from a foreigner’s poem could become the motto of a generation of German revolutionists. Many of Burns’s well-known poems do not only figure in this first part but are also the subject of specific case studies in the second. Here works such as «Tam O’ Shanter» or «A red, red rose» are analysed in translation through the ages. The author’s comprehensive work is complemented by a short research update on the reception of Burns.

This book examines Scotland from a great variety of international and disciplinary perspectives, offering viewpoints from ordinary citizens as well as experts in culture, history, literature, sociology, politics, the law, and the media. The texts investigate the mental processes, dispositions, and activities that have been involved in past and present discussions about Scottish independence, freedom, equality, justice, and the creation of a fair society. Such discussions have been shaped by specific values, ideologies, class or personal interests and objectives as well as by specific ways of telling their stories. These are analysed together with the European, global, and democratic dimensions of Scotland, in order to find answers to the question how coming of age might be achieved today.

Scotland’s efforts to establish and assert its distinct national identity have a long tradition. National identity has been a central theme throughout the centuries in a country where economic, political, and social issues have tended to be closely bound up with questions of national mentality and emotion. This book examines the part played by Scottish newspapers in constructing identity during a key period of the devolution process, 1997–2011. It uses insights from the fields of cultural and media studies, sociology, cognitive science and narratology into the ways in which culturally defined knowledge and the notions of identity emerging from it have been constructed. The study contributes to the understanding of Scottish identity, and its evaluations are relevant beyond the immediate context of Scotland and the United Kingdom.

Where do Scottish literatures, art, and cinema stand today? What and how do Scottish Studies investigate? Creative writers and scholars give answers to these questions and address vital concerns in Scottish, British, and European history from the Union debate and the Enlightenment to Brexit, ethnic questions, and Scottish film. They present new insights on James Macpherson, Robert Burns, John Galt, J. M. Barrie, Walter Scott, James Robertson, war poetry, new Scottish writing, and nature writing. The contributions highlight old and new networking and media as well as the persistent influences of the past on the present, analyzing a wide range of texts, media and art forms with approaches from literary, cultural, media, theatre, history, political, and philosophical studies.

Scott’s influence on Scottish tourism is widely discussed among scholars. However, only a few have provided a holistic analysis of the relationship between Scott and Scottish tourism from the 19th to the 21st Century in a theoretical framework. This book reveals how the myth of Scott has been created and appropriated at different stages of the development of the Scottish tourism industry by drawing upon Roland Barthes’ analysis of myth. The study is largely based on an analysis of 110 travel accounts and 48 guidebooks written between the 1770s and the 2010s. The author argues that Scott’s influence on the Scottish tourism industry is strongly ensured by a wide participation of various actors in continuously changing forms.

700 years of people in Scotland, England, Europe, and the world fighting for freedom, sovereignty, independence and justice are investigated in the essential periods and cultures since the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath: the Middle Ages, the Reformation and Early Modern Age, the English Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Cultural, media, political, and social studies, history, the law, art, philosophy, and literature are used for an analysis of the evolution of human rights, democracy, freedom, individual as well as national independence and justice in connection with past and present threats to them. Threats from politics, the economy, digitalisation, artificial intelligence, people's ignorance.With contributions by Alasdair Allan MSP, Christopher J. Berry, Neil Blain, Alexander Broadie FRSE, Dauvit Broun, Mark P. Bruce, Ewen A. Cameron, Robert Crawford, Ian Duncan, Richard J. Finlay, David Forrest, Edouard Gaudot, Marjory Harper, Sarah Longlands, Ben McConville, David McCrone, Aileen McHarg, John Morrison, Klaus Peter Müller, Hugh O’Donnell, Murray Pittock, Anthony Salamone, David R. Sorensen, Silke Stroh, Christopher A. Whatley and Ben Wray.

This book shows how Alasdair Gray’s first novel, Lanark: A Life in 4 Books, shares some of the thematic and formal concerns of postmodernist literature. The analysis is preceded by an introductory chapter which relates Gray to both the English and the Scottish literary traditions. Next, the author focuses on Lanark and explores the way the novel offers a representation of society in terms of ontological instability and dystopia as well as the implications to be drawn from its experimental nature.

This book analyses the relationship between Presbyterians and Catholics in eighteenth-century Scotland. The author considers the weapons wielded against the Scottish Catholic Mission by the state and by the Church of Scotland – penal laws, Royal Bounty missions and SSPCK schools. Once the government no longer saw Catholics as a threat to the safety of the state, Presbyterians were left to fight their crusade on their own. Convinced as they were that the best strategy in order to stamp out Catholicism was to eradicate ignorance, Presbyterians seemed to give pride of place to education. The author, however, argues that – for all their criticism of the attitude of the Church of Rome in Catholic countries – Presbyterians used similar strategies to try and improve their standing in the Highlands.