SCROLL: Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature – serie

Counter-revolutionary or wary progressive? Critical apologist for the Stuart and Hanoverian dynasties? What are the political and cultural significances of place when Scott represents the instabilities generated by the Union? Scott's Novels and the Counter-Revolutionary Politics of Place analyses Scott’s sophisticated, counter-revolutionary interpretation of Britain's past and present in relation to those questions. Exploring the diversity within Scott’s life and writings, as historian and political commentator, conservative committed to progress, Scotsman and Briton, lawyer and philosopher, this monograph focuses on how Scott portrays and analyses the evolution of the state through notions of place and landscape. It especially considers Scott’s response to revolution and rebellion, and his geopolitical perspective on the transition from Stuart to Hanoverian sovereignty.

Emblems in the visual arts use motifs which have meanings, and in Emblems in Scotland Michael Bath, leading authority on Renaissance emblem books, shows how such symbolic motifs address major historical issues of Anglo-Scottish relations, the Reformation of the Church and the Union of the Crowns. Emblems are enigmas, and successive chapters ask for instance: Why does a late-medieval rood-screen show a jester at the Crucifixion? Why did Elizabeth I send Mary Queen of Scots tapestries showing the power of women to build a feminist City of God? Why did a presbyterian minister of Stirling decorate his manse with hieroglyphics? And why in the twentieth-century did Ian Hamilton Finlay publish a collection of Heroic Emblems?

Sydney Goodsir Smith, Poet: Essays on His Life and Work offers the first substantial work to assess his life and writings since his premature death in 1975. Considered a major figure in the second wave of Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘Scottish Literary Renaissance’, Smith’s unique body of work has largely fallen from critical discussion of post-war Scottish literature. This book remedies this by showing how his work may have fallen out of favour, and then by reappraising his distinctive and varied achievements in poetry, drama, art and art criticism, the novel and translations. Early career and established academics explore the many strands of his work as the best way of giving this multifaceted literary figure renewed attention.

Throughout his career, self-taught Scottish writer James Hogg (1770-1835) violated literary proprieties which discouraged the frank treatment of prostitution, infanticide, and the violence of war. Contemporary reviewers received Hogg’s bluntness rather fiercely because, in so doing, he questioned the ideologies of chastity, marriage and military masculinities that informed emerging discourses of the British Empire. This book reveals the strategic use that Hogg made of the marriage plot to challenge the civilising ideal of the motherly heroine as well as martial and sentimental masculinities which supported the discourse of a strong but tamed national vigour, thereby highlighting Hogg’s critical use of gender stereotypes in relation to norms of class and ethnicity when deconstructing this plot convention.

When the Scottish poet Thomas Pringle emigrated to the Cape Colony in 1820 he voyaged also into a new creative life and an art responsive to his colonial home, “sterner verse” for “darker scenes”. Accompanying him to the Cape, the sonnet became his most consistent choice for capturing his experiences and convictions, his personal crises and the greater trauma of colonial appropriation and racial oppression. In this study his unique contribution to the Romantic-era sonnet is for the first time given its full due, through readings that are as attentive to form and formal agency as to the cultural, social and historical conditions in which they are enmeshed. Moving beyond colonial theory to consider issues of literary migration, this illuminating work shows how Pringle effectively opened up a radical conversation between the habitual modes of perception and response of British Romanticism and his new, southern world.

This study is the first exploration of the impact of World War Two on Scottish poets of both the front line and the home front. World War One has always been thought of as a poet’s war, one of horror and futility. The poetry of World War Two, by contrast, has long languished in its shadow, though there was a much greater amount of it written. This book asks whether these poets felt they were grown for war or rather that they grew through war experience, with an emphasis on the possibilities of the future instead of cataloguing the senseless horror of the battlefield. How were the hopes of Scottish poets different from their English counterparts? How was their poetry different, and how did it impact on their later lives?

This volume, edited by Richard J. Hill and Allison E. Francis, explores literary connections between Scotland and the Pacific. The contributors, including some of the world’s foremost scholars in Scottish and Pacific studies, examine how Scottish writing about the Pacific, and Pacific engagement with Scottish culture, generates a cultural examination of Scotland’s place in the British colonizing hierarchy. While Robert Louis Stevenson was the principal Scottish author who shaped these early discussions, other prominent Scottish authors are also analyzed. Several chapters examine Scottish engagement with the South Seas, before and after Stevenson’s involvement with Pacific cultural and political affairs. The book lends weight and understanding as to why Pacific Islanders—both immigrant and indigenous—often claim affiliations with Scotland, and in the case of Hawaii and Samoa, to Stevenson in particular.

This volume, written by young and established scholars, surveys the role of China in Scottish literature, and the translation and reception of Scottish literature in China. Part 1 considers how the image of China has been constructed by Scottish writers. Topics include the translation of classical and contemporary Chinese literature, into both Scots and English, and orientalist tropes in Scottish fiction. Part 2 discusses how Chinese translators, over a turbulent century, have rendered into Chinese the work of writers from Robert Burns to David Greig. It also shows how commercial success in today's China can shape a writer's career.

This edited volume provides a contemporary reappraisal of the work and legacy of Hugh MacDiarmid, presenting new perspectives from an international group of researchers. Addressing pivotal elements of MacDiarmid’s biography, politics, aesthetics and multilingual literary practice, this collection contextualises his writing within current critical discussions and evolving perceptions of modernism, nationalism, and cultural identity. The essays illuminate the complexities and continuities of MacDiarmid’s career, reassessing his contribution to twentieth-century literature and its relevance today. This volume is suitable for scholars, students, and informed readers, and it promotes renewed academic engagement with one of Scotland’s most influential and controversial literary figures.

Bella Caledonia: Woman, Nation, Text looks at the widespread tradition of using a female figure to represent the nation, focusing on twentieth-century Scottish literature. The woman-as-nation figure emerged in Scotland in the twentieth century, but as a literary figure rather than an institutional icon like Britannia or France’s Marianne. Scottish writers make use of familiar aspects of the trope such as the protective mother nation and the woman as fertile land, which are obviously problematic from a feminist perspective. But darker implications, buried in the long history of the figure, rise to the surface in Scotland, such as woman/nation as victim, and woman/nation as deformed or monstrous. As a result of Scotland’s unusual status as a nation within the larger entity of Great Britain, the literary figures under consideration here are never simply incarnations of a confident and complete nation nurturing her warrior sons. Rather, they reflect a more modern anxiety about the concept of the nation, and embody a troubled and divided national identity. Kirsten Stirling traces the development of the twentieth-century Scotland-as-woman figure through readings of poetry and fiction by male and female writers including Hugh MacDiarmid, Naomi Mitchison, Neil Gunn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Willa Muir, Alasdair Gray, A.L. Kennedy, Ellen Galford and Janice Galloway.

Disappearing Men examines the complex and rebellious representations of gender in the work of several writers of ‘devolutionary’ Scottish fiction in the period 1979 to 1999. The study focuses on the context of a ‘crisis in masculinity’ accompanying the rapidly changing male role in the period, concluding that men often disappear from sight in this writing, highlighting issues of male insecurity and female disorientation in a new gender landscape. Hence the novels examined here by authors James Kelman, Jancie Galloway, Jackie Kay, A.L. Kennedy and Alan Warner, strongly challenge the stereotype of the Scottish ‘hardman’ and his dominance in 20th century Scottish fiction. Disappearing Men dissects this challenge by giving major consideration to the relationship between the innovative literary forms often found in this writing and the concepts of selfhood they give rise to. The possibilities inherent in these texts of reimagining gender identity and relations make them important contemporary documents of our struggles with realising selfhood and relations with others. A sustained and intimate analysis, this monograph will be of crucial interest to those concerned with issues of gender and representation in our rapidly changing era.

In Beyond Identity, thirteen of Scotland’s best known poets reflect upon the theoretical, practical and political considerations involved in the act of writing. They furnish a unique guide to contemporary Scottish poetry, discussing a range of issues that include nationhood, education, language, religion, landscape, translation and identity. John Burnside, Robert Crawford, Douglas Dunn, Kathleen Jamie, Edwin Morgan, Kenneth White and others, together with such noted experimentalists as Frank Kuppner, Tom Leonard and Richard Price, explore questions about the relationship between social, economic and ecological realities and their poetic transformation. These interviews are set within the altered political context that followed from the re-establishment of a Scottish Parliament in 1999 and the potential of a renewed engagement with wider European culture.

This is the first ever comprehensive study of the Scottish medieval romances. The book reinstates the status of the Scottish romances. It offers a new definition of the Scottish romance tradition, bringing together texts which have not generally been considered part of the same corpus. It argues that Barbour’s Bruce (c.1375) established the rhetorical devices and literary traits which were going to be typical of the later Scottish romances. It also examines the extent to which the translation of the four Arthurian and Alexander romances from French originals follows Barbour’s precepts. These texts contributed to the founding both of the vernacular tradition and of the fabrication of national identity through dialogic interchanges between the narratives and the socio-historical circumstances of Scotland.

This volume provides an overview of women writers in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Edinburgh literary world. Its main focus is on the careers of three women – Elizabeth Hamilton, Anne Grant, and Christian Isobel Johnstone – who were both successful and influential in their own day, although they have tended to be overlooked in later literary history. Hamilton’s work is discussed in the contexts of her lifelong interest in moral philosophy and educational theory, while Grant, admired in her day for her letters, essays, and poetry about the Highlands, is read through eighteenth-century theories of cultural history and primitivism. Johnstone, probably the most obscure of the three today, was perhaps the most influential at the time because of her role as editor of a series of political periodicals; her fiction and journalistic work is examined in the context of the early nineteenth-century Edinburgh magazines.

J.M. Barrie’s critical reputation is unusually problematic. Originally viewed as a genius to rank with Shaw and Wilde, Barrie soon fell victim to damaging psychological theories about his life and his patriotism. The few critics who have commented on Barrie have colluded with dominant myths about a figure who, like his most famous creation, never grew up, who abandoned Scotland and made light of his own people when serious social analyses of the nation’s condition were called for, and who scorned the opportunities of University learning when at Edinburgh. Myths and the Mythmaker attempts to challenge these myths and offer a just revaluation of Barrie’s genius. Through closely focused textual analyses, it dispels the popular images of Barrie as “escapist” writer and immature, mother-fixated artist. It seeks to replace the narrow prose canon on which the “Oedipal” and “Kailyard” myths are based with a thorough account of his Victorian apprenticeship. New research into Barrie’s early work and criticism show the enduring influence of his Edinburgh education on his creative writing, his academic articles, and his own complex views on artistic genius.

Scottish and “Celtic fringe” postcolonialism has caused much controversy and unease in literary studies. Can the non-English territories and peoples of the British Isles, faced with centuries of English hegemony, be meaningfully compared to former overseas colonies? This book is the first comprehensive study of this topic which offers an in-depth study of Gaelic literature. It investigates the complex interplay between Celticity, Gaeldom, Scottish and British national identity, and international colonial and postcolonial discourse. It situates post/colonial elements in Gaelic poetry within a wider context, showing how they intersect with socio-historical and political issues, anglophone literature and the media. Highlighting the centrality of Celticity as an archetypal construct in colonial discourses ancient and modern, this volume traces post/colonial themes and strategies in Gaelic poetry from the Middle Ages to the present. Central themes include the uneasy position of Gaels as subjects of the Scottish or British state, and as both intra-British colonised and overseas colonisers. Aiming to promote interdisciplinary dialogue, it is of interest for scholars and students of Scottish Studies, Gaelic and English literature, and international Postcolonial Studies.

The nineteenth century is often read as a time of retreat and diffusion in Scottish literature under the overwhelming influence of British identity. Scotland and the 19th-Century World presents Scottish literature as altogether more dynamic, with narratives of Scottish identity working beyond the merely imperial. This collection of essays by leading international scholars highlights Scottish literary intersections with North America, Asia, Africa and Europe. James Macpherson, Francis Jeffrey, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and John Davidson feature alongside other major literary and cultural figures in this groundbreaking volume.

The chapters in this volume take as their focus aspects of three of the languages of Scotland: Scots, Scottish English, and Scottish Gaelic. They present linguistic research which has been made possible by new and developing corpora of these languages: this encompasses work on lexis and lexicogrammar, semantics, pragmatics, orthography, and punctuation. Throughout the volume, the findings of analysis are accompanied by discussion of the methodologies adopted, including issues of corpus design and representativeness, search possibilities, and the complementarity and interoperability of linguistic resources. Together, the chapters present the forefront of the research which is currently being directed towards the linguistics of the languages of Scotland, and point to an exciting future for research driven by ever more refined corpora and related language resources.

Although a number of publications have appeared in recent years marking the importance of the ‘swinging sixties’, many tend to be personally reflective in nature and London-centric in their coverage. By contrast, The Scottish Sixties: Reading, Rebellion, Revolution? addresses this misrepresentation and in so doing fills a gap in both Scottish and British literary and cultural studies. Through a series of academic analyses based on archival records, ephemera and work produced during the 1960s, this volume focuses, uniquely, on Scotland. In its concern with some of the key figures of Scottish cultural life, the book considers amongst other topics the implications of censorship, the role of little magazines in shaping cultural debates, the radical nature of much Scottish literature of the time, developments in the avant-garde and the role of experiment in theatre, film, TV, fine art and music.

The skillful use of the Scots language has long been a distinguishing feature of the literatures of Scotland. The essays in this volume make a major contribution to our understanding of the Scots language, past and present, and its written dissemination in poetry, fiction and drama, and in non-literary texts, such as personal letters. They cover aspects of the development of a national literature in the Scots language, and they also give due weight to its international dimension by focusing on translations into Scots from languages as diverse as Greek, Latin and Chinese, and by considering the spread of written Scots to Northern Ireland, the United States of America and Australia. Many of the essays respond to and extend the scholarship of J. Derrick McClure, whose considerable impact on Scottish literary and linguistic studies is surveyed and assessed in this volume.