Scottish Traveller Tales: Lives Shaped through Stories (review)

Abstract

The translation of a PhD thesis into a book is a precarious, and not always successful, undertaking. What may have satisfied a dissertation director, an advisory committee, and a small group of readers as regards contents, originality, structure, tone, and style of the issues discussed and the arguments advanced and made persuasive, often fails to impress a non-academic audience. The doctoral thesis submitted by Donald Braid and approved by Indiana University in 1996, with the title "The Negotiation of Meaning and Identity in the Narratives of the Travelling People of Scotland," may therefore well have raised an eyebrow or two when considered for publication outside its original domicile. Fortunately, the intellectual preciousness of the title did not deter the University of Mississippi Press from turning the thesis into a book called Scottish Traveller Tales, with the telling, but somewhat one-sided subtitle Lives Shaped through Stories, and the editors at the Press responsible for commissioning and then nursing it through the preparatory phase are to be congratulated on having had the foresight necessary to recognize this work's potentially wider appeal.