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.

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.