Scottish Literature Research Articles

Robert Burns’s Friend Robert Cleghorn in his Cultural Context

Folklore, Ethnology, Antiquarianism, Robert Burns, Scottish literature, Scottish poetry, Scottish song, Scottish music, Robert Cleghorn, Cultural History, Scottish history, Caledonian Mercury, Kingsknow, Redford, Saughton, George Thomson, Ann Hunter, Vocal music.

Re-viewing failure

William McGonagall, Dundee, Macbeth, Theatre Royal, Folklore, Ethnology, Drama, Scottish poetry, Scottish literature, Performance, William Shakespeare, Scottish History, Regional studies, Local studies, Celebrity

Romancing Stirling

Folklore, Ethnology, Scottish History, Romanticism, Walter Scott, Stirling, Stirlingshire, River Forth, Archaeology, Scottish literature, Tourism, History of Tourism, Maps, Cartography, Roy, Ford of Frew, Antiquarianism, Military Survey, Local Studies, Regional Studies

National Literature Education in Scottish Universities during the Renaissance Period

During the Renaissance period, Scottish universities made significant achievements in the field of national literature education. This paper first reviews the origins and development of Scottish universities, exploring the educational philosophies of the Renaissance, particularly the impact of humanism on education. It then analyzes the curriculum and teaching methods of literary education in Scottish universities, and examines the status of national literature within these institutions by introducing key writers and works of the period. The paper further elaborates on the specific measures, achievements, and challenges faced in the implementation of national literature education at Scottish universities. Finally, it summarizes the influence of Renaissance-era Scottish university literature education on modern literary education and proposes insights for contemporary educational reform. This study aims to provide valuable experiences and references for modern education through the examination of national literature education at Scottish universities.

XVIIIBibliography, Textual Criticism, Reference Works, and Miscellaneous

Abstract This chapter, in common with Chapter XVII, has broadly six sections, although there is crossing over between them: 1. Periodicals; 2. Edited Collections; 3. Editions and Associated Books; 4. Bibliography; 5. Miscellaneous; 6. Late Arrivals, which includes some items not covered in earlier chapters . In order to avoid confusion, YWES readers are strongly advised to consult the excellent ‘YWES Index of Authors and Subjects’ found at the end of the present volume. Thanks are due to Professor James May for input on the 2022 volume of The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer, and to Professor Patrick Scott for his input on the Burns Chronicle and Studies in Scottish Literature. The compiler is also grateful to those who facilitated ease of access to their journals such as Professor Shef Rogers and Script & Print, the Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia & New Zealand, Emma Brown and James Fleming in the instance of The Book Collector, and Dr Sarah Werner for access to PBSA—The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. Last but by no means least Juan Christian Pellicer, of the University of Oslo, a former YWES contributor, for generously making available to me his fascinating study Preposterous Virgil: Reading through Stoppard, Auden, Wordsworth, Heaney. If anyone or organization has been omitted, my apologies.

Provincialising MacDiarmid: Decolonisation and Scottish Literary History

Provincialising MacDiarmid: Decolonisation and Scottish Literary History

Robert Burns and Modern Ulster-Scots Poetry

Robert Burns’s influence on Scottish culture and literature is well attested, though in recent years bardology has been counterbalanced by a rising fashion for “bardoclasm”. In Ulster too Burns has featured prominently in official presentations of Ulster-Scots by the Ulster-Scots Agency and other public bodies. High-profile Burns Night concerts are now a staple and TV programmes have been commissioned to mark the occasion. Burns’s image also features prominently on the Ulster-Scots Agency websites and promotional materials. This essay will explore how Burns’s increased visibility in Ulster is replicated in the work of modern poets who use Ulster-Scots in their work. Modern writers from Ulster who use Ulster-Scots tend to have a slightly different relationship to the work of Burns than their predecessors, or modern Scottish writers. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Ulster-Scots writers would have been intimately familiar with the poetry of Robert Burns. In modern Scotland, Scots writing, and Robert Burns especially, features prominently in school curricula. Despite some efforts to incorporate more Scots and Ulster–Scots literature into the school curricula in Ulster, these do not generally feature. This means that Burns and Scottish poetry is introduced, if at all, through less formal channels. Modern Ulster-Scots poetry began in the 1990s with the Ulster-Scots Language Society’s Ullans magazine. The major writers to emerge from this revival were James Fenton and Philip Robinson. The early 2020s has witnessed an upsurge in writing in Ulster-Scots. This essay will explore Burns’s complex influence on this corpus of work. A strand of Ulster-Scots poetry is fairly traditional, with a focus on nostalgic, rural themes and concerns. It may be intuitive to think, therefore, that Burns may feature as part of this. However, it is perhaps in the work of the most self-consciously literary of modern Ulster-Scots writers where Burns’s work is most tangible. There are traces of Burns’s influence in several areas: in the forms and themes used, and in the way in which voice is created. Burns also at times functions as a sort of symbol for the vernacular itself, and provides a source of vindication for writers using a tongue which still often attracts opprobrium and ridicule in popular discourse.

The International Companion to Scottish Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century. Eds. Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen

<i>The International Companion to Scottish Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century</i>. Eds. Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen

Littoral Impressionism in The Wreck of the Archangel by George Mackay Brown

Abstract: George Mackay Brown’s poetic renderings of northern archipelagic world have never been considered in the context of the techniques of literary Impressionism as deployed to attain the aesthetic effect of reader engagement. It is possible to view the author’s mature collection of poetry The Wreck of the Archangel as composed on the principle of littoral Impressionism that expands Joseph Conrad’s idea of art as expressed in the Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”. This article will examine Brown’s ecosophy of community that emerges from his major aesthetic principles used to give the reader the literary experience of the seatangled multiperspectivity. Brown’s unique lyrical-narrative insights into multiplicity of qualia and ecopoetic focus result in particular aesthetic effect of phenomenological immediacy. Adopting such perspective on the Orkney author might be an important point for reassessment of his position in the history of Scottish and British literature.

Tom Nairn: A man with qualities

Nations and NationalismEarly View SYMPOSIUM Tom Nairn: A man with qualities David McCrone, Corresponding Author David McCrone [email protected] University of Edinburgh Institute of Governance, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Correspondence David McCrone, University of Edinburgh Institute of Governance, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author David McCrone, Corresponding Author David McCrone [email protected] University of Edinburgh Institute of Governance, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Correspondence David McCrone, University of Edinburgh Institute of Governance, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 08 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12968 The allusion is to Robert Musil's 1929 novel ‘The Man Without Qualities’. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL REFERENCES Carruthers, G. (2009). Scottish literature. Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748633104 Craig, C. (1996). Out of history: Narrative paradigms in Scottish and British culture. Birlinn. Johnson, R. W. (1988). Pallas. In London review of books, 7th July (p. 6). Nairn, T. (1977). The break up of Britain. Verso. Nairn, T. (1988). The enchanted glass: Britain and its monarchy. Verso. Nairn, T. (1997). Faces of nationalism: Janus revisited. Verso. Paterson, L. (1994). The autonomy of modern Scotland. Edinburgh University Press. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation

"Christianity in Scottish Literature" edited by John Patrick Pazdziora

Review ofJohn Patrick Pazdziora, ed., Christianity in Scottish Literature, Association of Scottish Literary Studies Occasional Papers no. 25 (Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2023), pp. xxxiv + 306, ISBN 978-1908980373. £19.95

Bog, Bothy, Zen: Introducing Sydney Scroggie's Environmental and Metaphysical Thought

Dundee poet and disabled hillwalker Sydney Scroggie is less well-known today than Nan Shepherd, Aberdeen’s spiritually and environmentally aware Scottish poet and mountaineer. Thanks both to Robert Macfarlane and Samantha Walton, there has been a recent revival in Shepherd studies, and this article, the first to consider Scroggie’s life and his writings, seeks to introduce Scroggie and his works to this conversation. While research into Shepherd has challenged traditional ideas of hillwalking as the sport of the lonely male mountaineer, Scroggie challenges any preconceived notions that hillwalking is an essentially abled activity. A nature writer, Scroggie’s writing presents an ecosystem of the senses where the physical and the metaphysical interact. By considering his environmental and metaphysical thought, this article presents Scroggie as a figure hitherto unfairly neglected by studies of both Scottish and British environmental thought, as well as Scottish literature. In similar ways to Shepherd and Frank Fraser Darling, Scroggie viewed humans and environment as intimately connected, and the Cairngorms as a landscape that should be respected and protected.

Contributors to this Issue

Other| March 01 2023 Contributors to this Issue Nineteenth-Century Literature (2023) 77 (4): 268–269. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2023.77.4.268 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Contributors to this Issue. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 March 2023; 77 (4): 268–269. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2023.77.4.268 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search Gerard Lee McKeever is Lecturer in Scottish Literature in the Department of English and Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Dialectics of Improvement: Scottish Romanticism, 1786–1831 (2020), winner of the BARS First Book Prize 2021. He is currently finishing a monograph titled Regional Romanticism: Southwest Scotland, c.1770–1830 for Palgrave Macmillan, as well as editing John Galt’s autobiographies for Angela Esterhammer’s “Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt” series. Claudia Stokes is Professor of English at Trinity University. She is the author of Writers in Retrospect: The Rise of American Literary History, 1875–1910 (2006); The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion (2014); and Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature (2022). She is currently preparing a scholarly edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s religious writings for Oxford University Press. * * *... You do not currently have access to this content.

The International Companion to Scottish Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen

The International Companion to Scottish Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, edited by Joanne Parker and Corinna Wagner

Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism ed. by Joanne Parker and Corinna Wagner Ann F. Howey (bio) The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, edited by Joanne Parker and Corinna Wagner; pp. xx + 688. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, £110.00, $145.00. Joanne Parker and Corinna Wagner, in their introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, clearly articulate the goal for this ambitious collection of essays: “to demonstrate that medievalism was as influential a cultural force in Britain . . . as was classical culture” throughout the nineteenth century (2). To accomplish that goal, the collection seeks to illustrate the “broad-ranging and diverse” nature of Victorian medievalism by examining “every major aspect” of the phenomenon “from the perspective of the many disciplines to which it is relevant today” (2, 4). Essays are therefore organized into six sections: Medievalism Before 1750 (4 chapters); Romantic Period Medievalism (6 chapters); Sources (9 chapters); Social, Political, and Religious Praxis (6 chapters); Arts and Architecture (7 chapters); and Literature (7 chapters). The chosen organization results in a number of strengths for the collection. As the section headings suggest, the collection is temporally diverse, beginning its study with texts and practices from long before the 1830s. Thus, although its title might signal the narrower temporal window of Victoria’s reign, the collection explores medievalisms throughout the long nineteenth century, and even earlier in its opening section. The book as a whole communicates a sense of the evolution of medievalism—that is, how later eras (re)constructed and engaged with the medieval era (variously defined) as soon as that era ended; charting an evolution of attitudes and tastes in the use of medieval materials is often a focus of individual chapters as well. Some chapters extend that evolution past the Victorian period, with reference to the continuing appearances of the medieval today. For example, John Haines’s “Medievalist Music and Dance” gestures to the legacy of Victorian music-hall in post-Victorian cinema; Parker’s “Anglo-Saxonism and the Victorian Novel” ends by considering these novels as the “roots of our contemporary culture” and citing twenty-first-century fiction and television (652); Inga Bryden’s “Tennyson and the Return of King Arthur” references the ongoing vogue for Arthurian objects. The Handbook’s evolutionary focus usefully debunks any notion that [End Page 681] the Victorians were doing something completely new in their recourse to the medieval past for literary, artistic, architectural, religious, and political inspiration, while simultaneously recognizing the importance of their scholarly, creative, theological, and political engagements with that past. The collection also traces evolutions across geographies. For example, the Sources section contains essays on Anglo-Saxon poetry (M. J. Toswell) and Anglo-Saxon sculpture (Jane Hawkes), Geoffrey Chaucer (Richard Utz), Irish and Welsh sources (Huw Pryce), Scottish literature and Arts and Crafts (Sarah Dunnigan and Gerard Carruthers), Italian influences such as Giovanni Boccaccio (Eleonora Sasso), and Old Norse-Icelandic texts (Carl Phelpstead). Geographical diversity goes further than the diverse objects of British medievalist study in the period, however. Chapters such as Francis G. Gentry’s “Medievalism as an Instrument of Political Renewal in Nineteenth-Century Germany” or Elizabeth Emery and Janet T. Marquardt’s “The Influence of French Medievalism on Victorian Britain” investigate similarities and differences between medievalisms in other European countries. Other essays—for example Kathleen Davis and Nadia R. Altschul’s “Orientalism, Medievalism, Colonialism, and Militarized Mercantilism” and G. A. Bremner’s “The Gothic Revival beyond Europe”— trace the British export of medievalism to other parts of the globe, whether in colonial attitudes or in architectural designs. As with the temporal diversity of the collection, this geographic diversity demonstrates the way that medievalism affected virtually every sphere of nineteenth-century life. In addition, it suggests the ways that people in a variety of national contexts adapted medievalism to their local circumstances and deployed it for their own purposes, emphasizing the malleability of medievalism and the suitability of the plural term medievalisms. The collection also impresses because of the variety of fields covered and approaches employed. Literature is well-represented throughout, from the Ballad Revival (David Matthews), the Lake Poets (Tom Duggett), and Sir Walter Scott’s novels (James Watt) to...

Hugh MacDiarmid’s Influence on the Scottish Literary Revival

The interwar period of national revival produced a great variety of literary, critical, social, political and philosophical writings that have commonly been referred to as “The Scottish Renaissance.” The term was first used in its new sense in the first issueof The Scottish Chapbook of August 1922, published by Christopher Murray Grieve,better known by his pen name, Hugh MacDiarmid. In comparison with earlier attempts to renew Scottish culture, the single most distinctive feature of this movement was the belief that “there could be no regeneration of the nation’s artistic culture which did not also involve the regeneration of the social, economic and political life of the nation”(McCulloch xiii).

Esther Inglis: A Franco-Scottish Jacobean Writer and her &lt;em&gt;Octonaries upon the Vanitie and Inconstancie of the World&lt;/em&gt;

This article draws attention to the hitherto ignored poetry of the Franco-Scottish Jacobean calligrapher and limner, Esther Inglis (c.1570 -1624). Inglis is the subject of a fast growing body of published scholarship, but though she left a small body of original prose and verse, she has been given no place in Scottish literature. The article falls into six sections. The substantial first section notes first that to date, there has been a tendency to shy away from dealing with her as a writer, and that Inglis’s formative Scottish background has been largely ignored. The second section looks at Inglis and her family in Edinburgh, as well-integrated Huguenot bourgeois immigrants. The short third section considers Inglis’s spiritual reading material, and the lengthier fourth contextualises and then analyses the three commendatory sonnets that preface several of her productions. The short fifth section briefly survey Inglis herself as an author, and the sixth introduces the fifty Octonaries upon the Vanitie and Inconstancie of the World, which are currently known in only three manuscripts she created before 1610. The article itself is followed by the first-ever printed text of Inglis's Octonaries, textual notes with variats among the three manuscripts, and three appendices.

루이스 그래식 기본의 『스코틀랜드 서』

This essay aims at two academic goals by analyzing Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair. First, a study of Scottish literature, especially the Scottish Renaissance during the early twentieth century, will help to rethink England-oriented studies of British literature in South Korea and to widen the horizon of studying twentieth-century English literature and modernism. It is only recently that scholars began to appreciate how the primary writers associated with the Scottish Renaissance resisted regressive nationalism or idyllic regionalism. Although the Scottish Renaissance rarely received critical attention in South Korea, it had arisen to reestablish Scottish identity within the ever more complex relationship with the British Empire after the First World War and thus offers an invaluable position to investigate the inner contradictions of British literature. Second, this essay’s study of Gibbon’s masterpiece will focus on its ecological imagination and the ways in which it helps to design more inclusive and just social relations. The protagonist Chris’s ecological attitude and imagination allow her a critical stance toward a series of humanistic beliefs that seek to remodel humanity on their ideals; however, the novel never compromises its realistic recognition of grueling social conditions at the time in Scotland which made it difficult for her vision to be actualized. This powerful ecological imagination combined with the uncompromising historical consciousness creates a narrative tension in this magnum opus and helps to maximize its artistic greatness.

Linguistic Properties of Metamodernist Concepts in Anglophone Art Discourse (Case of Modern Scottish Prose)

Introduction. The article attempts to identify the main trends in the development of modern works of Scottish prose. The main aim is to consistently identify linguistic means and mechanisms for implementing the characteristic features of metamodernism, comprehending changes in the authors’ views on the text as well as their choice of tools for interaction with recipients. Methodology and sources. The starting point for the methodology is the description by Robin van den Acker and Timotheus Vermeulen of the key vectors of modern literature development under the umbbrella of such a phenomenon as metamodernism, which reveals both its inevitable kinship with postmodernism and its own philosophical and aesthetic aspirations. Results and discussion. When compared with writing samples exemplifying innovations and traditions of other times and related cultures, the set of modern Scottish prose texts under analysis reveals trends towards the regular use of such techniques as intertextuality, rhizome as a structural model, rejection of traditional methods for constructing time and space, rethinking of the motives and plots from the cultural archives. The introduction of innovative storytelling styles provides opportunities for addressing acute social issues and previously tabooed topics. Conclusion. It is the texts of Scottish literature that seem to facilitate a vivid illustration of modern metamodernist, and in particular neorealist tendencies: the desire to turn to the past in order to deconstruct it, experiment with genre, create opportunities for free reading. However, the culture and traditions of Scotland invariably manifest themselves in the literary practices implemented by the prose writers. Thus, in Scottish prose, the general literary trends and the cultural specifics of the country are intertwined in a unique combination.

John Burnside. Ed. by Ben Davies

John Burnside. Ed. by Ben Davies. New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic (Contemporary Critical Perspectives), 2020. 166 pp. $90.00. ISBN 978–1–3500–3697–0. Many critics have voiced the opinion that John Burnside is a key figure among those writers who maintain an ecologically-focused vision throughout their work. Such gestures at canonization have now been given formal weight by Bloomsbury Academic, which dedicated a volume to Burnside in their series ‘Contemporary Critical Perspectives’. The volume spares no effort; editor Ben Davies has recruited some notable literary authors alongside distinguished Burnside scholars to give detailed and compelling scholarly attention to the many facets of his prose and poetry. Citing abundantly from his dreamy yet inch-perfect prose, Peter Childs argues that Burnside expresses his Gnostic vision abstractly via descriptions of physical details such as bodily pain or sensual perception. Also focusing on his metaphysical worldview, Jan Wilm concludes that the awareness of dead spirits or God’s presence is provisional in Burnside’s poetry: the supernatural, for him, is always ‘almost’ perceptible. Wilm claims that since Burnside is interested in the boundaries of existence, it is the indeterminacy of the relationship between humans and other creatures that provides the underlying tone of his poems. Several other aspects of Burnside’s textual world are also investigated in depth: Alexandra Campbell probes the paradox between violence and familiarity, which is a central concern in his prose; Ruth Cain aims to clarify the sociopathic traces of his prose from a Lacanian standpoint; while Julian Wolfreys sets out to interpret his motifs of crossing, continuity and transformation in a subjective essay. Monika Szuba’s informed study calls on Heidegger to shed light on Burnside’s notion of homeliness in a geographical and linguistic sense. Also relying primarily on Heidegger but proceeding from definitions of the pastoral, Tom Bristow’s essay moves heavy philosophical equipment to untangle Burnside’s ecologically-themed poems. David Borthwick tackles the otherworldly and Unheimlich presences in Burnside’s verse. The volume ends with an informal interview conducted with the writer by Ben Davies and a useful, fifteen-page long Further Reading section. This marvellous collection will significantly contribute to our better understanding of John Burnside’s diverse ecological interests: it is required reading for Burnside scholars and strongly recommended to everyone whose research concerns ecological themes in contemporary British and Scottish literature. [https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqac011]