Scottish Literature Research Articles

Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature: From Joyce to Kelman, Doyle, Galloway, and McNamee (review)

Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature: From Joyce to Kelman, Doyle, Galloway, and McNamee (review)

Scottish Extractions. ‘Race’ and Racism in Devolutionary Fiction

Black Scottish and Scots Asian representations have been prominent in twenty‐first‐century Scottish literature. This essay contends that such fiction (covering the period 1995–2004) is most productively read in correlation with a wider contemporary debate on race, ethnicity and nationalism in a devolved Scotland and it provides such a reading, focusing among others on Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998), Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag (2004), Luke Sutherland’s Venus as a Boy (2004) and Jelly Roll (1997), and James Robertson’s Joseph Knight (2003). I argue that a preoccupation with ‘race’ and racial issues in this fiction cannot but be read as contiguous with an ongoing devolutionary momentum in Scottish culture and politics that has shifted the parameters of Britain and Britishness since the delivery of political devolution in 1997. In such a momentous context of political transformation, literature has sought to challenge undetected (or underwritten) levels of Scottish racial discrimination that weigh heavily in discussions surrounding Scotland’s autonomous position – culturally and politically – in a ‘post‐British’ world and it provides an opportunity to interrogate an emergent controversy concerning the political economy of ‘orthodox’ Scottish identity.Underpinning my analysis are a number of issues at the heart of debates over ‘devolutionary’ identities. I question whether the novels discussed register a collapse of Britishness in a period when the coherence of ‘British’ fiction becomes increasingly unstable. The stability of ‘black British’ as a unitary cultural term after devolution is also questioned in relation to the emergence of ‘black Scottish’ literature. Relative to this is the issue of how the protagonists of these novels situate themselves in relation to debates surrounding Scotland’s settled ethnic heritage. I argue that contemporary Scottish novels instigate a focus on relatively suppressed Scottish patterns of race and racism and that they challenge the manner in which Scottish identity is predominantly figured in terms of ethnicity. In conclusion, my overview suggests that these novels are far from being myopic in their Scottish focus and that the dislocated Scottish characters gesture to a greater international understanding of the manner in which globalised conditions are permanently entangled with localised forms of exclusion and extraction. A devolved literature is also an internationally engaged one. Its bilateral focus, I suggest, configures the alignment of Scottish racial issues with devolutionary matters in the UK and global realignments in class and cultural geographies.

Edinburgh companion to twentieth-century Scottish literature

Edinburgh companion to twentieth-century Scottish literature

Book Reviews

THE EDINBURGH COMPANION TO ROBERT BURNS. Edited by Gerard Carruthers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. 978 0 7486 3648 8. £70.00 (hbk). 978 0 7486 3649 5. £18.99 (pbk). There was a spate of very useful collections of essays on Burns published in the 1990s. Partly this was due to the two-hundredth anniversary of his death in 1996, which occasioned conferences that, in turn, produced published proceedings. But something about Burns also invites the multiplicity of interpretive angles that such volumes make possible, and, conversely, resists the unifying grand thesis that might inspire an academic monograph. In the collections edited by Kenneth Simpson, Burns Now (1994) and Love and Liberty (1996), and Robert Crawford, Robert Burns and Cultural Authority (1997), this quality led to the inclusion of a broad range of commentators, including contemporary poets, novelists and musicians. Gerry Carruthers's volume for the Edinburgh Companions to Scottish Literature series is equally broad in terms of the number of angles from which Burns is approached, but, floating free from any particular occasion, is more scrupulously academic. The result is a definitive survey of the present state of Burns Studies. Most of the essays here can be grouped under one of two headings. On the one hand there are those that address the ways in which Burns borrowed from or reacted against earlier poets and figured in the literary cultures that came after him. Rhona Brown makes a convincing case for Robert Fergusson as the crucial model for the satires. In 'Burns's Songs and Poetic Craft' Kirsten McCue argues that Allan Ramsay perhaps became a more important precursor when Burns turned to song writing and collecting. Steven McKenna links Burns directly to Virgil's Georgics, while Kenneth Simpson places Burns the narrative artist in relation to the various traditions on which he drew in this respect. Alison Lumsden reveals just how much Burns there is in the Waverley novels, suggesting the extent to which Scott's appropriation of Scottish folk tradition was mediated by the poet's example, not only as an inheritor of that tradition but also as its collector and editor. Potentially most interesting for readers of The Byron Journal under this heading is Fiona Stafford's essay on responses to Burns among Romantic poets and critics more generally. This essay identifies the publication of Dr James Currie's edition of the Works in 1800, with its revelatory biography of the poet attached, as something of an epoch in the period. Stafford makes the important distinction between the older generation (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott) that first encountered the poetry unencumbered by knowledge of Burns's personal life, and later generations that came to the poetry through the biography. But striking here is the extent to which Byron and Shelley responded in the same paradoxical way as Wordsworth: to reject the specifics revealed by literary biography as a distraction from the lasting value of a poet's works, while continuing to insist that this value was, in a more general way, the product of the poet's most intimate self. Of course, Burns himself had, from the beginning of his poetic career, advertised the connection between one aspect of his biography (his status as a labouring tenant farmer) and his poetry, perhaps thereby inviting the curiosity of his readers. …

Scottish Utopian Fiction and the Invocation of God

Explicitly utopian novels are relatively uncommon in twentieth-century Scottish fiction, perhaps due to a prevailing conception of Scottish literature as inherently peripheral; for many critics and authors, Scotland is already a place outside the mainstream of political and historical narrative. Utopian themes and imagery, however, have frequently been used by Scottish writers to address the role of religious experience in contemporary life. In novels by Robin Jenkins, Neil M. Gunn, Alasdair Gray, and Iain M. Banks, the utopian form presents the possibility of abandoning traditional religious practices in favor of direct discourse with the divine. Even as they appear to repudiate organized religion, these novels also demonstrate the continued relevance of God and myth. Whether in outright science fiction such as Banks's Culture series and portions of Gray's Lanark, classical utopias such as Gunn's The Green Isle of the Great Deep, or ostensibly realist novels such as Jenkins's The Missionaries, utopian imagery is used to examine what role the divine might have in a secular society. These Scottish utopias offer a place to discuss the relationships between individuals, communities, and nations and how these relationships are reconstituted in a modernity where God is known only as absence.

On the Translation of Voices, Accents, Tongues: Scottish Poets Commemorating Robert Burns Today

In 2009, Scotland was celebrating the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, the country’s world-famous and greatest national bard. Burns’s first collection of verse appeared in 1786 under the title Poems. Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect and was known as the ‘Kilmarnock Edition’. It is the title of this first collection that has been borrowed for a recent anthology of poems New Poems. Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, prepared and published in the 2009 anniversary year as a tribute to the bard. This anthology contains works which refer openly to being after Cavafy, Hölderlin, Li Po, Pasolini or Montale, to name just a few foreign influences. The range of poetic and linguistic possibilities points to Scotland’s penchant for diversity. It also highlights a phenomenon that for centuries has been part of Scottish literature – translation.

Scottish Utopian Fiction and the Invocation of God

Abstract Explicitly utopian novels are relatively uncommon in twentieth-century Scottish fiction, perhaps due to a prevailing conception of Scottish literature as inherently peripheral; for many critics and authors, Scotland is already a place outside the mainstream of political and historical narrative. Utopian themes and imagery, however, have frequently been used by Scottish writers to address the role of religious experience in contemporary life. In novels by Robin Jenkins, Neil M. Gunn, Alasdair Gray, and Iain M. Banks, the utopian form presents the possibility of abandoning traditional religious practices in favor of direct discourse with the divine. Even as they appear to repudiate organized religion, these novels also demonstrate the continued relevance of God and myth. Whether in outright science fiction such as Banks’s Culture series and portions of Gray’s “Lanark,” classical utopias such as Gunn’s “The Green Isle of the Great Deep,” or ostensibly realist novels such as Jenkins’s “The Missionaries,” utopian imagery is used to examine what role the divine might have in a secular society. These Scottish utopias offer a place to discuss the relationships between individuals, communities, and nations and how these relationships are reconstituted in a modernity where God is known only as absence.

Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness (review)

Reviewed by: Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness Howard I. Kushner Mark S. Micale . Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. xv + 366 pp. Ill. $29.95 (978-0-674-03166-1). Beginning with his Ph.D. dissertation more than two decades ago, and a series of articles and book chapters since, Mark Micale has explored the history of male hysteria as a medical diagnosis in the nineteenth century. This book brings these writings together and places them in wider historical context. Micale begins in the seventeenth century and follows the recognition and periodic repression of male hysteria through early twentieth-century psychoanalysis. His portrait of Freud's "brilliant" and ambivalent decades-long encounter with male hysteria is emblematic of the larger story Micale tells, as it demonstrates "how productive the study of the subject could be" and "how very difficult it would be for any male scientist of this era [or earlier] to transcend the inherited categories of masculinity and femininity" (p. 275). Micale's is not a story of progress but rather of a continuing struggle of physicians "to break out of the historical 'prison of gender'" (p. 275). Thus he examines the persistence of the seventeenth-century debate over the connection between female-gendered hysteria and the male-gendered diagnosis of hypochondria. Examining the writings of Thomas Willis and Thomas Sydenham, Micale uncovers fissures in the categorical borders that enabled others, including eighteenth-century [End Page 785] British novelists, to view emotionality in men as appropriate expressions of a new sensibility that challenged earlier notions of appropriate gendered responses. Despite the more frequent diagnosis of female hysteria, Micale insists that "seventeenth-and eighteenth-century English and Scottish medical literature," including the writings of Robert Burton and Samuel Johnson, "can be viewed as a sort of pre-psychiatric discourse on male hysteria" (pp. 46–47). This opening was, according to Micale, eclipsed as "a great wave of amnesia regarding the nervous disorders descended on European medicine around 1800" (p. 49). During this period, "medical science and practice were aggressively pressed into the service of . . . maintaining a regime of difference between the sexes," thus excluding behaviors such as hysteria from being ascribed to men (p. 49). Of course, there were a few dissenting voices, like that of the French physician Étienne-Jean Georget in the 1820s, but these were drowned out by a much wider consensus that insisted on strict gender boundaries between the sexes. It was left to the great French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot in the 1870s to establish male hysteria as a legitimate diagnosis. Unlike his predecessors, "Charcot had genuinely come to believe that men and children were susceptible to the same nervous disorders as women" (p. 124). In "propounding a theory of hysteria in the male," writes Micale, "Charcot was also attempting to undermine a theoretical model of the disorder that had led to some of the most deplorable therapeutic practices of his day" (p. 128). Nevertheless, as Micale shows, despite his eagerness to identify male hysteria, Charcot continued to ascribe traditional gendered attributes to the distressed, including assumptions about the "otherness" of male hysterics as inheritors of degenerative constitutions. In the decades following Charcot, a group of turn-of-the-century physicians and scientists, including Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Otto Weininger, "challenged traditional assumptions about male and female sexuality and gender identity, but," Micale finds, their theories were "also laden with internal anxieties and inconsistencies" that "simultaneously sustained and subverted the socio-sexual regime of the day" (p. 179). Thus, despite many findings that hysteria was more frequent in men than in women (p. 183), Micale notes that "on closer inspection, the medical discourse of male hysteria during the 1880s and 1890s repeatedly exhibits a set of rhetorical and interpretive strategies of resistance" (p. 193). These strategies continued to ascribe male hysteria to so-called inferior classes of patients, those who, for one reason or other, failed the test of "true" masculinity: "Thus, despite Charcot's innovative work, the male victim of hysteria in the . . . French medical imagination was still frequently envisioned as an effeminate heterosexual or a physical or emotional hermaphrodite...

Rev. of Scotland's Books: A History of Scottish Literature, by Robert Crawford, and The Mighty Scot. Nation, Gender, and the Nineteenth-Century Mystique of Scottish Masculinity, by Maureen M. Martin.

Rev. of <i>Scotland's Books: A History of Scottish Literature</i>, by Robert Crawford, and <i>The Mighty Scot. Nation, Gender, and the Nineteenth-Century Mystique of Scottish Masculinity</i>, by Maureen M. Martin.

Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature * Welsh Environments in Contemporary Poetry

Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature * Welsh Environments in Contemporary Poetry

Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature: From Joyce to Kelman, Doyle, Galloway, and McNamee

Reviewed by: Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature: From Joyce to Kelman, Doyle, Galloway, and McNamee Len Platt (bio) Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature: From Joyce to Kelman, Doyle, Galloway, and Mcnamee, by Mary M. McGlynn. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 248 pp. $74.95. Mary M. McGlynn's book is determinedly positioned beyond postcolonialism. Although she draws on Homi Bhabha's work to show how hybridity and heteroglossia give voice to the dispossessed of empire, McGlynn makes it clear that she shares David Lloyd's critique of Bhabha's faith in hybridity as a universally positive force and more generally highlights dissonances between what she sees as the postmodern condition and certain kinds of postcolonial teleology.1 From this perspective, McGlynn constructs a critical agenda for such contemporary writers as James Kelman, Roddy Doyle, Janice Galloway, and Eoin McNamee outside of "the homogenizing tendencies of an overarching cultural nationalism" (9).2 For all the suggestions of the Celtic fringes in her title, she seeks to identify narratives of class on the urban periphery that reveal "the richness of local identities evolved beyond constructions of nation, engaging in international discussions and maintaining their own distinctive sound" (32). Distinguishing this new literature from romanticized bourgeois traditions that normalize class relations and attempt to assimilate working-class experience, McGlynn identifies a much more radically engaged body of writing. It establishes itself in relation to what Raymond Williams calls "dominant cultural forms" through narrative innovations that move beyond "authenticity/representation" to disrupt long-standing binaries—between narrator and character, for example, and, equally importantly for McGlynn, between the urban and the rural (16).3 The edge of the city thus becomes the location, or "space," that defines a new modernism, or postmodernism. Such ideas are not entirely new—McGlynn follows, for example, Ferdia MacAnna, to whom she refers.4 Her sense of Joyce as the great forerunner and enabler of these class narratives, however, does constitute [End Page 158] an original position, one that counters the commonplace view of Joyce the elitist with an entirely different Joyce. Here he registers not least as the poet of phenomenology who, at the same time as he rewrites flux, apparently uses what Franco Moretti calls "cacophonic polyphony" to "enfranchise those silenced" (30).5 The amount of space devoted specifically to Joyce in McGlynn's book is relatively small—some twelve pages—but throughout Narratives of Class, there are numerous passing references to his work. At a range of levels, from narrative styles to perceived similarities in characters and in the political articulations of writers, it is clear that the crucial linkage joining these "new" narratives—elsewhere criticized for being limited, parochial, and even reactionary—and the highly prestigious culture of high modernism is Joyce. Much of this theoretical positioning is striking and refreshing. It also has the virtue of being rooted in the realities of Thatcherism and New Labour that produced the urban fringes and the writing with which McGlynn's study is engaged. The difficulty comes with the claim McGlynn makes for Joyce as the progenitor of the so-called "dirty realism" of the 1980s and 1990s. In order to sustain this claim, McGlynn argues that class is central to Joyce's work, and she has a point. But she also makes highly overstated claims concerning what she sees as Joyce's commitment towards voicing the experiences of a dispossessed Dublin working-class, notably in Ulysses. In order to make such a claim, minor characters like Dilly Dedalus and the whores of Nighttown are forced to stand as representatives of working-class life, with "Wandering Rocks" and "Circe" illustrating technical innovation in Ulysses more widely. From this position, McGlynn writes of an "interdependency of the female and working-class voices and the formal innovations of the text," a formulation that, if not "the most often-noted of Joyce's varied legacies" (28), is clearly important to McGlynn's thesis. There are serious problems in argumentation at this stage of Narratives of Class. Dilly Dedalus, whatever her material situation, is not working-class, nor, as Joyce constructs them in "Circe," are the Nighttown whores. "[F]ormal innovation" in Ulysses...

Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature (review)

Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature (review)

Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540 (review)

Reviewed by: Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540 Rhiannon Purdie Joanna Martin, Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. 212. ISBN: 978–0–7546–6273–0. $99.95. The very specific theme of this volume as identified by its title—‘kingship and love’ in Older Scots poetry—belies the great value of this excellent study to all those with any interest at all in Older Scots poetry or medieval advisory literature. The distinctive Scottish situation of a succession of royal minorities through the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with all the social anxieties that this engendered, is reflected in the literature of this period by a marked interest in ‘advice to princes’ literature. Martin successfully widens this category to include the ‘strongly discernable body of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Scots poetry concerned with the wooing of kings’ (1). She argues that these texts use the lens of amatory discourse to explore ideas about ‘the most profound and challenging aspects of the governance of the self, that prerequisite quality for the rule of others’ (p. 2), thus broadening their significance from the personal or abstractly philosophical to the topically political. The focus of the texts discussed in this volume is, as Martin demonstrates convincingly, on ‘the challenges to self-governance (and thence to political governance) posed by the destabilizing advent of a young ruler’s sexual maturity’ and ‘the impact of desire on royal rule’ (pp. 12–13). Chapter one begins, inevitably, with The Kingis Quair (probably by James I) and the Quare of Jelusy, poems uniquely preserved in that important fifteenth-century Scottish anthology, Bodleian Library Arch. Selden B.24. Readers of Arthuriana will be particularly interested in the second chapter on Lancelot of the Laik. Four more chapters cover Gilbert Hay’s Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice (a chapter which provides much incidental insight into the Middle English romance Sir Orfeo via its Scottish cousin King Orphius), The Thre Prestis of Peblis, and King Hart. There is an epilogue on ‘Poetry and the Minority of James V,’ which deals with the much more direct relationship between Sir David Lyndsay and his one-time royal pupil. Underpinning this study is an investigation of the influence of three important works on this body of poetry: the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum; Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum and its vernacular descendents, and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Gower, she contends, is an ‘important precursor of the poetic combination of amatory and political discourses, and the focus on the king’s amatory self, in later Scots writing’ (p. 3). Martin’s study is characterized by shrewd and subtle close readings of her primary texts supported by a wealth of contextual evidence drawn from contemporary Scottish writings, antecedent English works (particularly those of Gower and Hoccleve), Continental sources, and the manuscript settings and circulation histories of these poems. This is a deeply scholarly work, elegantly written, highly informative, and an important contribution to the study of late-medieval Scottish literature. [End Page 141] Rhiannon Purdie University of St Andrews Copyright © 2009 Arthuriana

Review: Arts of Resistance

This is an unusual and fascinating book. It has the form of an extended dialogue in three instalments between Alexander Moffat and Alan Riach, and it is based on a series of lectures which they gave in the National Galleries of Scotland. It is lavishly illustrated. Appropriately, one of the authors is a poet and the other a portrait painter. Alan Riach has published four books of poems and he is the Professor of Scottish Literature in Glasgow University. Alexander Moffat was Head of Painting in the Glasgow School of Art from 1992 to 2005. One of his paintings is the celebrated 'Poets' Pub' of a group of Scottish poets surrounding Hugh MacDiarmid, in more senses than one.

Brigadoon: Lerner and Loewe's Scotland

Since the 1950s, Brigadoon has been accepted as a representation of Scotland. Brigadoon's Scotland consists of a highland landscape with lochs, mists, castles populated by fair maidens, warlike yet sensitive kilted men, and bagpipers. Much of this comes from the invented traditions of Scotland, such as kilts and clan tartans; late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Scottish literature; Scottish propaganda for tourism following World War II; and Scottish popular culture. In spite of Lerner's well-written book, Loewe's charming music, and Agnes De Mille's exciting choreography, the Scottishness of the work received, and still receives, the most attention. Brigadoon's inauthentic or dubious depiction of Scotland points to the complex relationship between popular culture, history, and art. But is Brigadoon Scottish? I will argue that Brigadoon reflects an example of discursive unconsciousness, drawing on Scottish literary traditions, what Scotland's own popular culture produced as Scottish and devices that are viewed as Scottish by the western world.

Scottish Science Fiction: Writing Scottish Literature Back into History

The increasing vigour of Scottish literature since the 1980s has led not only to a revival in literary fiction, but also to a growing diversification into other narrative genres. The detective story – in the form of so-called “tartan noir” – has been the most obvious popular genre to undergo revival, but science fiction has also blossomed in the work of authors such as Alasdair Gray, Iain (M.) Banks, and Ken MacLeod. In this article, I trace something of the problematic history of Scottish sc...

Review: Culture, Nation, and the New Scottish Parliament, by Caroline McCracken-Flesher

Book Review| December 01 2008 Review: Culture, Nation, and the New Scottish Parliament, by Caroline McCracken-Flesher Caroline McCracken-Flesher, ed., Culture, Nation, and the New Scottish Parliament. Cranbury, N.J.: Bucknell University Press and Associated University Presses, 2007. Pp. 279. $53.50. David Goldie David Goldie Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde. He is coeditor, with Gerard Carruthers and Alastair Renfrew, of both Beyond Scotland: New Contexts for Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature (2004) and the forthcoming Scotland in the Nineteenth-Century World. His major work in progress is a book on Scottish literature and popular culture during World War I. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (2008) 63 (3): 428–431. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2008.63.3.428 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 David Goldie; Review: Culture, Nation, and the New Scottish Parliament, by Caroline McCracken-Flesher. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 December 2008; 63 (3): 428–431. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2008.63.3.428 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 This content is only available via PDF. © 2008 by The Regents of the University of California2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Translation of the Democratic Intellect: Scottish Literary Education in Tokyo

I Method This survey of attitudes towards Scottish culture is based on fifteen-question questionnaires distributed to undergraduate students in Tokyo before and after Scottish literature courses I conducted during the period 2000-2004. The questionnaires were distributed to students at three different universities, one singlesex private, one mixed private, and one mixed national, all in Tokyo. The courses fell under various names, which had a bearing on students’ expectations and thus how well they were able to relate the national specificities of Scottish literary culture to other questions within the humanities. Approximately two-thirds of the recipients responded in all, and the larger absolute number of respondents from the first institution is mostly due to the fact that I taught the course for three years (extended from one) and that the number of students was surprisingly high, at times exceeding 100. No student filled in the questionnaire twice, even if they attended the course more than once, and all students answered independently, that is, without conferring with one another. An attendance record of two-thirds was expected, though not strictly enforced, giving rise to the possibility of students missing something apparently obvious; one irony is that Japanese students spend much of their fourth year sorting out their jobs to come (and there were a few finalists in these classes).

The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature

The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature

Review: Scotland in Europe

Professor Jack and Dr Tom Hubbard have collected seventeen essays by various Scottish and international academics relating to Scotland's literary interactions with Europe through the centuries. Hubbard's introduction sets the framework provided by the work done over the last ten years by BOSLIT (Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation), which itself grew out of his experience in the Scottish Poetry Library where a lack of records about translation of Scottish poetry into other languages was evident. The remit for these essays is cultural on a wider basis than poetry or literature alone, covering music and film for instance. He makes clear the need for providing resources to study Scottish literature in Europe to those wanting to do so, and reciprocally, for us in Scotland to learn more about the cultures which are translating us. 'At the beginning of the twenty-first century we have a renewed Scotland and a renewed Europe but we have much to learn about how we got there. Learn in Scots and Scottish English means both to learn and to teach.' Scottish literature has been subsumed within British literature for most of the twentieth century, and it is partly through seeking identification with other minority language cultures and small nations in Europe that it has gradually been able to distinguish itself. Yet it is largely Germany which has demonstrated the greatest interest in specifically Scottish literature over the centuries, and little Portugal which has had the least contact.