Studies in the History and Culture of Scotland – serie

Since World War I, the self-contained communities of Gaelic-speaking Scotland, characterised by collaborative effort and a robust sense of communal identity, have been transformed. Improved transport and communications have brought today’s Gaelic speakers into the culture of mainstream Western society. Once an integral part of daily life, Gaelic singing has become an art form heard less at home than on concert platforms, at the Mòd, and on commercial recordings, where a «good voice» and emotive style – neither part of the traditional aesthetic – help singers differentiate themselves in the traditional music marketplace. Written in an accessible style and providing guidance for those wishing to access audible examples, this book will help both scholars and general readers grasp the magnitude of change as it has transformed an important aspect of Scottish Gaelic culture.

It is a generally accepted truth that the flute was unknown in Scotland prior to 1725, and that it was played exclusively by wealthy men. Upon examination, these beliefs are demonstrably false. This book explores the role of the flute in Scottish musical life, primarily in the long eighteenth century, including players, repertoire, manuscripts, and instruments. Evidence for ladies having played the flute is also examined, as are possible connections between flute playing and bagpipe playing. Reasons for the flute’s disappearance from the pantheon of Scottish instruments are considered, and interviews with contemporary flute players in Scotland depict flute playing in contemporary Scotland. This work fills a major gap in knowledge of Scottish musical life and flute history.

For the past twenty years, Scottish death culture has emerged as a focus of scholars drawn from a wide variety of disciplines. Death comes to us all but too often we treat it as a private or personal matter. The former taboo about death is slowly lifting and contemporary research is playing an increasing part. Accordingly, the fifteen essays gathered in this book probe the multi-facetted role of death in Scottish history and culture. They explore personal fears of death, anxieties about Predestination, prayers for the dead and the appeal of Spiritualism. They analyse the public face of death in law, economics and medicine: changes in capital punishment, funeral poverty, the teaching of anatomy and prevention of stillbirths. Within the worlds of religion and ritual, they consider the making of saints, burial practice following the Scottish Reformation and the tradition of keening within the Gáidhealtachd. With an Introduction by Professor Jane Dawson, these essays by specialists in the field not only highlight the richness of the primary sources for studying death in Scotland but reveal how death studies identify key features of Scottish life and society across ten centuries.

Scotland’s islands are diverse, resourceful and singularly iconic in national and global imaginations of places «apart» yet readily reached. This collection of essays offers a fascinating commentary on Scotland’s island communities that celebrates their histories, cultures and economies in general terms. Recognising a complex geography of distinct regions and island spaces, the collection speaks to broader themes of tangible and intangible cultural heritage, narratives of place and people, the ideas and policies of island and regional distinctiveness, as well as particular examinations of literature, language, migration, land reform, and industry. With a view to placing ideas and expressions of islandness within a lived reality of island life and scholarship, the collection provides a multidisciplinary perspective on the value of continued and expanding research commentaries on Scotland’s islands for both a Scottish and an international readership. This book should instantly appeal to scholars of Island Studies, Scottish Studies, and Regional Studies of northern and peripheral Europe. Readers with particular interests in the sociology and history of Scottish rural and northern Atlantic communities, the cultural histories and economies of remote and island places, and the pressing socioeconomic agenda of small island sustainability, community building and resilience should also find the collection offers current commentaries on these broad themes illustrated with local island examples and contingencies.

«This labour of love is everything a critical biography should be: informative, gossipy, admiring and more than capable of restoring Sharp’s reputation, giving him his rightful place in both Scottish literature and Scottish screen writing history. »(Carl MacDougall, writer and former President of Scottish PEN)«If Alan Sharp’s career was a unique one within modern Scottish culture, it has proved an underexplored one within modern Scottish Cultural Studies. "The Anti-hero’s Journey" remedies that collective oversight by making a compelling and critically informed case for both the individual singularity and international significance of Sharp’s creative voice.»(Jonathan Murray, Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture, Edinburgh College of Art)Alan Sharp was Scotland’s greatest screenwriter and one of its most important transnational writers. The adopted son of a Greenock shipyard worker, he became a bestselling novelist, a leading playwright, a record-breaking Hollywood screenwriter and the central figure of a new Scottish national film industry. Today, however, his books, television plays and screenplays are forgotten.This study seeks to restore his work to the prominence it deserves. Including previously unknown work available only now in the Alan Sharp papers collection in the University of Dundee Archive, it traces the life’s work of a man who made a unique contribution to Scottish culture and considers his themes, especially his awareness of landscape and his use of the ambivalent male protagonist, the anti-hero.Working in exile but consistently «coming back» to his homeland, Sharp wrote from a point of view which allowed him to love Scottish culture without having to pamper it and gave him the detachment to connect it with others. «The Anti-hero’s Journey» seeks to reposition him as a vital component of Scottish cultural studies from the 1960s into the twenty-first century and proposes that he should be re-evaluated as a major contributor to contemporary transnational Scottish cultural history.

Criticized as parsimonious and cruel in the later 1800s, the Poor Law for Scotland was first passed in 1845 as a frankly humanitarian measure in response to desperate poverty on display in Paisley and elsewhere in the early 1840s. Poor Law Inspector James Shaw Brown of Paisley Burgh Parish, a compassionate, detail-oriented bureaucrat, was charged with alleviating suffering while limiting expense. In his four-decade career he served the poor, the parochial board, and rate payers of the parish, weaving their conflicting needs and demands though the arcane rules of the law. Inspector Brown and colleagues across the nation interpreted and debated the meaning of the law in correspondence and the courts for decades before it approached its final form. This book delves into Inspector Brown’s life and records to reveal how poverty and the poor law shaped life experiences for tens of thousands of ordinary Scots in the middle years of the nineteenth century.

«We have here a masterly, well-indexed and clear account of the evolution of the legend of the Brahan Seer over the centuries, one that will add a contextual depth in understanding to the many sources which give the prophesies attributed to him. Sutherland manages to inform his readers of the way in which tales and traditions were transmitted in Gaelic culture, on the externally generated romantic images of the Highlands as well as their appropriation by the natives.»(Iwan Wmffre, University of Ulster)The Brahan Seer is a legendary figure known throughout Scotland and the Scottish diaspora, indeed anywhere there are people with an interest in looking into the future. This book traces the legend of the Seer between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. It considers the seer figure in relation to aspects of Scottish Highland culture and society that shaped its development during this period. These include the practice of witchcraft and prosecution of witches; the reporting of and scientific investigation of instances of second sight; and the perennial belief in and use of prophecy as a means of predicting events. In so doing the book provides a set of historicised contexts for understanding the genesis of the legend and how it changed over time through a synthesis of historical events, oral tradition, folklore and literary Romanticism. It contributes to the debates about witchcraft, second sight and prophecy and the relationship between ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ culture in Scotland. By taking the Brahan Seer as a case study it argues that ‘popular’ culture is not antithetical to ‘elite’ culture but rather in constant (and complex) interaction with it.

The period 1855 to 1955 was pivotal for modern Scottish death culture. Within art and literature death was a familiar companion, with its imagined presence charting the fears and expectations behind the public face of mortality. Framing new concepts of the afterlife became a task for both theologians and literary figures, both before and after the Great War. At the same time, medical and legal developments began to shift mortality into the realms of regulation and control. This interdisciplinary collection draws from the fields of art, literature, social history, religion, demography, legal history and architectural and landscape history. The essays employ a range of methodologies and materials – visual, statistical, archival and literary – to illustrate the richness of the primary sources for studying death in Scotland. They highlight a number of intersecting themes, including spirituality and the afterlife, the impact of war, materiality and the disposal of the body, providing new perspectives on how attitudes towards death have affected human behaviour on both personal and public levels, and throwing into relief some of the unique features of Scottish society.

Margaret Tait – filmmaker, photographer, poet, painter, essayist and short story writer – is one of the UK’s most unique and remarkable filmmakers. She was the first female filmmaker to create a feature-length film in Scotland (Blue Black Permanent, 1992). Although for most of her career Tait remained focused on the goal of making a feature-length film, her most notable and groundbreaking work was arguably as a producer of short films. The originality of her work, and its refusal to accept perceived barriers of genre, media and form, continues to inspire new generations of filmmakers.This book aims to address the lack of sustained attention given to Tait’s large body of work, offering a contextualisation of Tait’s films within a general consideration of Scottish cinema and artists’ moving image. Furthermore, the book’s grounding in detailed archival research offers new insights into Scotland (and Britain) in the twentieth century, relating to a diverse range of subjects and key figures, such as John Grierson, Forsyth Hardy, Hugh MacDiarmid, Lindsay Anderson and Michael Powell.

This volume aims to fill a historical gap in the recent coverage of musical life in Scotland. The seventeenth century in Scotland, as in Europe, was one of religious controversy and civil strife. The period has thus been neglected by music historians in comparison with the centuries before and after it. But despite loss of royal patronage after 1603 Scots still made their impact as composers and preservers of their musical language. It was in this century that a distinctive Scots melodic idiom crystallised, as those ‘defining strains’ laid the basis for the flowering of song, both Highland and Lowland, a century later. At this time Scots also took a lively interest in the music of England, Ireland, France and Italy, as is evident in the music manuscripts of the period. This volume is the result of new research into such key figures as the composers Tobias Hume, William Kinloch, Patrick MacCrimmon, and the Aberdeen publisher John Forbes; it looks at the important manuscripts, including those of the classical bagpipe, harp, lute and keyboard repertoire as well as imported French and Italian music; it deals with burgh and ceremonial music, secular songs and their texts, and the psalm-singing that dominated public life. The essays are newly written from a range of specialties, including those of manuscript source analysis, text and music relationships, social contexts, and performance practice.

This study argues that James Kelman’s work should not be construed as a resigned capitulation to capitalist domination or to the fracture of a once unified working-class collective purpose. Politics are to be found not only in the content but also the form of Kelman’s work. The radical aspect of his style is that rather than pandering to a ready-made identity, he remains antagonistically non-identical to the prevailing logic of capitalism by contesting its supposedly shared worldview and modes of perception. Instead, Kelman’s fiction continually disputes the notion of consensus by revealing the voices of those excluded, those who are unaccounted for in that false consensus. His work uncovers a stark contradiction in the governing logic of our times: we are asked to accept that class has disappeared at the same time that we are told the system that causes it in the first place – capitalism – is inevitably here forever. Even the most alienated individuals in his stories remind us that isolation can transcend itself by returning us to the social conditions that are its cause. We find politics in Kelman’s aesthetics, as his work formally contests who has the right to feel, to think, to speak.

Filmmaker Bill Forsyth is one of the most important and fondly regarded of all living Scottish artists. His filmmaking career, beginning with That Sinking Feeling (1979), paved the way for the emergence of an indigenous Scottish cinema. It also established Forsyth as one of the most distinctive and original voices in late twentieth-century European film. This book offers the first integrated and comprehensive study of the director’s complete œuvre. Through extended textual analysis and contextual discussion of each of Forsyth’s eight features, it traces the key formal and thematic characteristics of a remarkable career, one which encompasses both three-figure production budgets in Glasgow and multi-million-dollar adventures in the heart of Hollywood. The book also uses Forsyth’s films to explore the diverse range of film industrial contexts the director has worked within. Most importantly, it sheds light upon the hitherto under-documented zero-budget travails of 1970s Scotland and inflated expectations of early-1980s British film.