Scottish Writers Research Articles

The realization of the concept of the features of the historical novel by Walter Scott on the example of Barry Unsworth's novel "Moralite"

The article examines the features of the concept of the historical novel by Walter Scott on the example of Barry Unsworth's novel "Morality Play". The purpose of this article is to identify the features and principles of the historical method. The great merit of the outstanding Scottish writer Walter Scott (1771-1832) is that he introduced the principle of historicism into literature and wrote a number of brilliant historical novels. In them, readers see a picture of the struggle of contradictory and complex interests of various social groups, parties, and religious sects. His historical novels provided a better understanding of contemporary issues. He combined historical truth with fiction, explaining the validity of such a connection by saying that “the most important human passions in all their manifestations, as well as the sources that feed them, are common to all classes, states, countries and epochs; hence it invariably follows that although this state of society affects opinions, way of thinking and the actions of people, these latter are extremely similar in their very essence. Walter Scott was the founder of the historical novel in its modern sense. In the XIX century, he developed the principles of the historical method, which made it possible to create fascinating novels, freed from excessive archaization of language and at the same time fully conveying the originality and recognizable imprint of the described epoch. In the 19th century, along with the tradition dating back to Walter Scott, another form of aesthetic insight into the past also asserted itself. Real historical characters in such works are optional, although their presence is not excluded. The "hero" for the writer is not a historical event, but an "epoch". The author of such a work creates his own self-sufficient world, achieves credibility not by more or less accurately following historical material, but by the reality of the psychological experience of the characters, the reality (often illusory) of everyday life. The novel "Morality Play" is a historical detective novel by British writer Barry Unsworth, was published in 1995, and was first published in Russian in 2005. The novel is an example of a fruitful combination of two updated genres: new historical fiction and metaphysical detective.

A Reconciliation with Reality and Self-preservation

ABSTRACT The untimely loss of a loved one is an excruciating ordeal. Renowned Victorian Scottish writer George MacDonald was obliged to face the recurring early deaths of family members all his lifetime. Drawing from the background of Victorian literature and his working experience in church, he forges a reconciliation with reality and realizes his self-preservation through religion. His masterpiece, At the Back of the North Wind, is the reflection of his life sufferings, inner world, and way of reconciliation with reality. By examining the characterization of Diamond and North Wind, two leading characters in the book, and the employment of his unique literary technique, this article aims to reveal his motivation in portraying the protagonist of the book—Diamond, a poor little boy living in London, and conclude MacDonald’s means of self-preservation, i.e., interpretation of early death: those who pass away at a young age are angels from heaven. After fulfilling their earthly missions, they return to a better realm they inherently belong to—Heaven. Hence, earthly life is only a fragment of human beings’ existence. MacDonald’s coming to terms with bereavement while facing death holds practical significance today, especially for the people suffering from the loss of loved ones during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Роман В. Скотта «Пуритане» в контексте романа И.А. Гончарова «Обломов»

The article describes the study of typological connections between the novel Puritans by Walter Scott and Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov. For the first time, these literary texts are considered through the prism of depiction as an artistic and aesthetic category, based on the genre system of fine arts. The name of the “Scottish sorcerer” is found in every novel of Goncharov’s trilogy (Ordinary History (1847), Oblomov (1859), The Precipice (1869). Most often, numerous landscapes can be found both on the pages of Scott’s and Goncharov’s novels. These landscape paintings are brought together by the plasticity of the image, decorativeness, careful detailing, epic manner and coloristic features. When creating idyllic landscapes, the Russian writer is guided by Scott’s style, combining both “high” poetic and everyday life within the framework of one image. Important in this regard are the landscapes of the famous ninth chapter of Oblomov’s Dream and as well as the pictures of Scott’s nature scattered throughout the text. In addition to the interdisciplinary genre of landscape, the authors have similar portrait descriptions (Oblomov and Milnwood). A special place in these novels is occupied by everyday scenes that convey the color of everyday life, the poeticization of reality , which is an important aesthetic category for both Russian and Scottish writers. They are in the spirit of the Flemish tradition. In addition, both novels are related by the typological similarity of storylines and characters (main and secondary).

A Saga of Cosmopolitan Friendship in Time of the Breaking of Nations: A Study of Ali Smith’s Autumn

Brexit, Britain’s exit from the supranational polity of the European Union has unsettled the vision of European unity. Rather than nourishing an “and/ both” cosmopolitan view even in the limited context of continental relationship, Britain inculcates an “either/ or” jingoistic nationalism fed on Euroscepticism. English literature has a long tradition of invoking political issues and Brexit has inaugurated a new sub-genre, ‘BrexLit’. The paper seeks to attempt a detailed study of Scottish writer Ali Smith’s novel Autumn (2016), designated by The New York Times as “the first great Brexit novel”. The first of the seasonal quartet, this novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017 and bagged the 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Embedded in the Brexit Britain, the novel raises questions of citizenship, particularly in relation to immigration, and mirrors the loss of cultural conviviality. The paper discusses anti-immigrant toxicity, the upsurge of nostalgic appetite for national heritage, and the territorial social ontology of the contemporary English national outlook. The paper studies, in the context of the narrative, how the media resorts to post-truth politics and right-wing nationalistic propaganda in media resulting in the death of democracy and the end of dialogue. The paper explores how the novel advocates an inclusive, realistic cosmopolitanism through Elisabeth-Daniel friendship.

Ciência e moralidade vitorianas em o Médico e o monstro, de Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

ABSTRACT This article analyzes how Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) depicts the relationship between science and morality (secular or religious) in his 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. For this purpose, I analyze the setting choice (London) and some characteristics of late Victorian Gothic fiction that constitute the negative aesthetics of which Stevenson’s characters are formed. Then, I analyze how the negative aesthetic juxtaposes with an order that is both scientific and moralist in a cultural context in which the reading public is obsessed with crime. Eventually, I discuss the theories of 19th-century philosophers and scientists, such as Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), and Francis Galton (1822-1911), in an attempt to understand Stevenson’s novella from an allegedly scientific point of view. I conclude that Hyde/Jekyll was “destined” to fail since both late Victorian science and morality were prone to condemn the “unfit”.

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.

Exploring Sir Walter Scott's Notions of Scottish Identity in the Context of Brexit and Scottish Independence

Numerous studies have investigated the concept of the nation and Scottish identity in the prose fiction of Sir Walter Scott. These studies have traditionally highlighted Scott’s role in reshaping public perceptions of the Scottish Highlands, their culture, and the suffering of the Highlanders under the British Empire, through his detailed knowledge of Scottish history and culture. However, it is essential to reconsider this issue in light of recent historical and political developments in Scotland after Brexit and the calls for independence by various Scottish thinkers, writers, and political leaders, aiming to join the European Union. This study revisits Scott’s concept of the Scottish nation and identity in his two texts, “The Highland Widow” and “The Two Drovers”. The findings suggest that the nationalist sentiment in Scott's writings is relevant to the social and political changes occurring in Scotland, Europe, and globally. It can be argued that much of the contemporary discourse on Scottish independence can be traced back to Scott's works, indicating a recurring historical pattern. Scott expressed concern for the loss of Scottish national identity and the right of self-determination. His texts vividly demonstrate the interconnection of past and present events, embodying both historical and contemporary perspectives.

A Map of Divergence and Connection: Voices from Nineteenth-century Nunavut and Aberdeen

This essay explores interactions between five people – Inuit, Scottish, and American – in Nunavut and Aberdeen, Scotland, between the late 1830s and the 1860s. The fact that these people all knew each other, or of each other, provides an opportunity to investigate a rich network of communication between them over a twenty-year period. The main primary sources investigated include the first biography of a young Inuk, written by a Scottish doctor; an American explorer’s tale of his Life with the Esquimaux; and the personal journal of a Scottish whaling captain’s wife. The investigation focuses on five subjects which occur persistently across these works: blood, mapping, tea, maktaaq and other country food, and the act of leave-taking. The topics form nodes, sometimes of incommensurability between Inuit and Qallunaat (an Inuktitut word designating non-Inuit, usually white, people) but they can also become areas through which misunderstanding and separation give way to understanding and close bonds. The fact that in these sources Inuit voices are ventriloquized by white Scottish and American writers greatly increases the risk that Inuit historical voices could be misrepresented and misheard. As a non-Inuit scholar, I am acutely aware that I may mishear or misunderstand these voices myself. In my analyses of the source material, I can bring the close attention of a scholar of nineteenth-century literature to attend to tone, ambiguity, the historical period, genre, and also to the occlusions and confusion in the writing that may obscure (often unconsciously) the redaction of veritable, if not entirely verifiable, Inuit voices from the nineteenth century. But I may be wrong, and this uncertainty is fundamental to my methodology. The expectation of scholarly writing in the academy is that it will be presented in an authoritative voice, but my methodology while listening for historical Inuit voices in the chosen sources must entail uncertainty. Research in the following essay is an open letter to other scholars, and especially to indigenous scholars and readers, who may agree or disagree with what I hear and interpret of Inuit voices in some lesser-known works of the mid-nineteenth-century historical record.

Детская литература и антропоканинная культура: собака Нэна Джеймса М. Барри при межкультурном переводе

The representation of dogs in children’s literature forms the subject of this article. It is framed within the concept of human-canine societies introduced by the French anthropologist Dominique Guillot who claimed that alongside any human society there exists a hybrid society formed by human beings and dogs in which dogs are regarded as its full members. Such societies exist in each country and they generate their own cultures that are developed gradually through ontogenetic ritualization but may change over time. The focus of the following research is the interconnection between children’s literature and such human-canine cultures. I claim that children’s literature is influenced by them and influences them at the same time. The key figure of the research, the Scottish writer James M. Barrie, not only gave dogs the status of full members of the society but endowed them with the status of his muses in his personal, public, and literary life. His own dog, a landseer Newfoundland called Luath, was his pet, friend, muse, and a prototype for Nana, a nanny dog from Barrie’s most famous play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. I aim to study and analyze the transformations that occur to Nana when the play was staged, adapted, illustrated and published into a different human-canine culture. The source material of the study is a draft version of the play, the first published version of the play, illustrations for numerous British and American adaptations of the Peter Pan story, and the first Soviet edition of the play. The three parts of the article describe the history of the creation of Nana and the formation of her iconography in Great Britain; the history of the first American production and two further adaptations of the play, as well as the changes that Nana underwent in the American tradition; the history of the first translation of the play in the USSR and the work of the translator and artist in the construction of the Soviet Nana. I come to the conclusion that the image of Nana is formed in the period of time when the contemporary human-pet culture was introduced and incorporated into British mindset. I prove that Nana was Luath’s copy: his character and even his black marks were recreated in Nana’s costume. Moreover, Barrie’s popularity and his daily walks with Luath in Kensington Gardens turned the writer and his dog a landmark in London, so the British iconography of Nana developed rapidly and practically did not change over time. In the United States and the Soviet Union, the countries with their own unique human-dog cultures, Nana was transformed into a St. Bernard and a Cocker Spaniel respectively. Such transformations may be explained by different reasons. While in the United States this is a consequence of the blend of Luath with Barrie’s first dog, St. Bernard Porthos, which the writer himself confessed, in the USSR the reasons were rooted in politics and ideology which to a large extent influenced Soviet human-canine culture and hence the representation of dogs in children’s books.

Культурные коды в детской литературе: голоса из Шотландии и Армении

The article studies culture codes in contemporary children’s literature and aims to identify how language units and imagery condense and transmit the culture code of a specific society and epoch. The authors narrow down the research to two countries — Scotland and Armenia — because of the common features of their children’s literature: the use of a different language in fiction, the approach to the cultural component in fiction and the influence of the countries’ past. The research has two distinct directions: based on selected texts by Scottish writers the paper discusses the issue of transmitting culture codes in a multi-voiced medium. Further, based on the text by Narine Abgarian, a Russian writer of Armenian origin, the culture codes of childhood in the multicultural setting are discussed. It is argued that despite the current trends in the international book market, children’s literature containing authentic cultural information should be promoted. Such children’s literature performs an important mission toward shaping the readers’ identity, raising awareness of one’s own culture and facilitating intercultural communication.

Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain: Making Female Pleasure Visible

In the light of the new readings that Nan Shepherd’s texts are being subjected to as part of her academic and popular revival, I offer an analysis of her non-fictional volume The Living Mountain (1977) from an ecofeminist standpoint. Given the situation where, until now, the Scottish writer’s masterpiece has been almost exclusively linked to travel literature, construction of regional identity and environmental issues, the conjunction of ecology and gender that my research proposes creates an opening for the less explored world of female physical sensation and pleasure. The aim of this article is to upset the exclusive Nature/Woman connection as opposed to Man/Reason, because, as I will show, it proves to be restrictive, arbitrary and unfair. To this end, I will respond to some of the issues Eva Antón raises in her article “Claves ecofeministas para el análisis literario” (2017), where it is suggested that all literary texts should declare their ethical stance with respect to ecology and gender. All the above suggests that, contrary to the classical attitude of possession and conquest of the land, love combined with pleasure is the recipe Shepherd recommends for successfully accomplishing her archetypical journey across the Cairngorms.

‘Scoto-Shamanistic’: The Collected Works of Kenneth White

A review-essay discussing the work and influence of the expatriate Scottish poet and cultural theorist Kenneth White, based on vols 1-2 of the new Edinburgh University Press edition of White's Collected Works, edited by Cairns Craig (2021, paperback 2023), placing White in a line of Scottish polymath internationalist writers, from Buchanan and Urquhart, through Miller and Carlyle, to Geddes and MacDiarmid.

Genre Strategies of a Historical Novel and a Detective Story in Abir Mukherjee's Work "A Man with a Great Future"

The purpose of this study is to analyze genre strategies in modern British multicultural literature on the example of A. Mukherjee's novel "A Man with a Great Future". The subject of the study is the genre dominants of the detective and historical novel in the work of A. Mukherjee, in particular elements of the classic English detective literature, as well as detective novels by Scottish writers of the XX century, who paid considerable attention to social issues in their works. The relevance of the article is determined by the relevance in modern humanities of scientific works devoted to the study of genres and genre models, including their transformation in modern world literature. The novelty of the work is determined by the low degree of study of A. Mukherjee's works, mainly from the point of view of genre specificity in the context of the expression of multicultural features of the text under consideration. The main research methods are biographical, comparative-historical and typological. As a result of the analysis, it is concluded that A. Mukherjee refers to the structure of the classical model of both the detective and historical novel, but adds a social and national context to the traditional genre dominants. The strategies of the detective and historical novel allow the author to reflect the patterns of historical determinism that determined the development of modern Britain and India, as well as to identify the origins of British multiculturalism, of which A. Mukherjee himself is a part.

Willa and Edwin Muir's Alternative Kafka: Translation, Imitation, and the Fable

Willa and Edwin Muir's Alternative Kafka:Translation, Imitation, and the Fable Gregory Ariail (bio) During the 1930s and 1940s, the New York literati, as Anatole Broyard put it, "would rush in [to bookstores] wild-eyed, almost foaming at the mouth, willing to pay anything for Kafka."1 Perhaps no foreign language writer of the late modernist period was more read, written about, and imitated from the 1930s to the mid-1950s than Franz Kafka (1883–1924). The publication of his short stories in The Great Wall of China (1933) and The Penal Colony (1948), along with his novels The Castle (1930) and The Trial (1937), translated into English by the accomplished Scottish writers Willa and Edwin Muir, caused such a storm among contemporaries in Britain and America that it was recognized as an event—the "Kafka rage" (Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage, 3). Those swept up by the Kafka rage rarely engaged with his works in the original, since few Anglophone mid-century writers could read German competently. Even those who had some command of the language professed their struggles with reading Kafka in German. Samuel Beckett echoes the contemporary sentiment when he writes: "All I've read of [Kafka's], apart from a few short texts, is about three-quarters of The Castle, and then in German, that is, losing a great deal."2 In a 1932 letter, Aldous Huxley writes to a friend: "I have only read The Castle and some of the short stories in German. Can't face The Trial in German, so am waiting for the translation."3 Paul Bowles elaborates on the same theme of an initial bilingual engagement and then capitulation in the face of Kafka's difficulty and a language barrier too substantial to overcome: "I loved [Kafka] even then, in translation. And then I tried to read him in German, but I didn't [End Page 693] really know enough to stay with it very long. Then I forgot what little German I had learned. I was never able to read anything in the original German. But I have read Kafka in English, again and again."4 The majority of late modernists from both sides of the Atlantic relied heavily on the translations of Willa and Edwin Muir, who produced a steady diet of English translations over a twenty-year period. Many little magazines, such as The Partisan Review, New Directions, The Quarterly Review, and others, carried English versions of various stories, translated by a wide range of writers such as the art critic Clement Greenberg and Sophie Prombaum. These publications certainly contributed to the intense creative and critical interest in Kafka's work, but the Muirs' translations got much wider circulation and were touted at the time by cultural darlings like W. H. Auden, who called Edwin Muir the "best translator" in English (Willa, sadly and typically for women translators, was often forgotten in critical discussions of the time).5 The Scottish couple was close to Kafka's inner circle, as well. They were friends with his last lover, Dora Dymant, who "arrived in London as a refugee" before the war; she, too, championed the Muirs as English translators of Kafka.6 The Muirs' translation practices involving Kafka's novels helped proliferate theological (and specifically "Kierkegaardian-Calvinist") readings of Kafka, as well as political (prophetic of the bureaucratic horrors of the Fascist state) readings that had theological undertones.7 This apparent conceptual filter in the Muir translations, which is curious given their otherwise anti-Calvinist stances, has been analyzed at great length by contemporary Kafka scholars and translators such as Ritchie Robertson, Joyce Crick, and Mark Harman.8 Yet the Muirs' approach to translating Kafka's fables—his short stories about animals and hybrids—has received very little critical attention, though these "minor" works were as influential, in their own right, as Kafka's novels; it shows them invested in ambiguity and thinking outside political-theological paradigms. By turning away, to a large degree, from The Trial, The Castle, Amerika, and novellas like "The Metamorphosis," to examples of an array of short fables translated during the 1930s and 1940s in contemporaneous little magazines, and setting them beside the Muirs...

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.

Addressing the Machine: Victorian Working-Class Poetry and Industrial Machinery

Abstract This article explores the representation of machinery by industrial workers in the Victorian period, and argues that their writings have a qualitatively different literary approach to machinery than that found in the work of established Victorian authors. It uses little-known poems by Scottish and Northern working-class writers to investigate how they use language and form to reflect upon the place of machinery in their working lives.

“Signing off on the right side of History?” Relating in Louise Welsh’s apocalyptic trilogy

This article examines the way the Scottish writer Louise Welsh contributes to the trend of postapocalyptic fiction in the 21st century, with her plague times trilogy. Relying on the critical and theoretical writing of Michael Foessel, Jean-Paul Engélibert, Bertrand Gervais, Denis Mellier, Hélène Machinal and François Hartog, it shows that Welsh’s trilogy, which spans the whole catastrophe from the outbreak of the virus to the aftermath of the apocalypse, borrows from the essential tropes of the genre to reflect upon the necessity for humans to relate to their past and their future, but also to relate to themselves and to each other. Welsh depicts a presentist world, where the chaos of the pandemic has severed all connection to people’s past, which precludes any meaningful projection into the future. The temporal closure is given spatial treatment, and the characters in the last volume are turned into collectors of fragments from the material past and from the political past. Welsh also uses the generic codes of crime to recapture the severed link, or create a new one, and to question the new world order that her novels depict.

Cosmopolitanism and the Scottish Working-Class Writer: John Parkinson/Yehya-en-Nasr and Islam in Ayrshire

Explores the grassroots cosmopolitan and international literary interests of Scottish working-class writers, through the writing of the Scottish poet and convert to Islam John Parkinson or "Yehya-en-Nasr" (1874-1918), in the Ardrossan and Saltcoats Herald, in the monthly The Islamic World and the weekly newspaper The Crescent, as a journalist in Rangoon, and in book form, notably his Lays of Love and War (Ardrossan, n.d.), arguing that Parkinson's "Muslim cosmopolitanism" and his local Ayrshire identity and contexts were inextricably intertwined.

Re-imagining religion: Scottish writers and the breadth of religion

To tie in with this issue’s theme of theology and imagination, this review essay reflects on four relatively recent works by Scottish authors in order to explore the ubiquitous and often deeply unsettling experience of Scottish religion in literature and the arts.
 Reviewed works:
 Meg Bateman, Robert Crawford and James McGonigal, eds., Scottish Religious Poetry: From the Sixth Century to the Present (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 2000)
 Edwin Morgan, A.D.: A Trilogy of Plays on the Life of Jesus (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000)
 James Robertson, News of the Dead (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2021)
 David Brown, God and Grace of Body: Sacrament in Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

“A Feeling of Space”: Margaret Oliphant’s Supernatural Short Fiction in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine

ABSTRACT During her prolific career, the Scottish writer Margaret Oliphant (1828–97) produced a cluster of short stories and novellas about the “seen and the unseen” world of supernatural and spiritual phenomena. This essay evaluates Oliphant’s contribution to the genre of the supernatural short story, focusing on the ten supernatural tales she published in the conservative Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine between 1857 and 1897. Oliphant’s stories of the seen and the unseen occupy an uneasy ideological space between the commercial, the pious and the subversive and unusually seek to establish a continuum between this life and the next. This ambivalence is represented spatially in the stories’ persistent preoccupation with thresholds and journeys, which Oliphant uses to suggest the liminal encounters between the living and the dead and the passage from life to death but also to explore questions of gender, religion and modernity. Drawing on a critical framework provided by the spatial humanities, I read the stories’ overlapping spatialities – generic, periodical, gendered, spiritual – as indicative of the opportunities, constraints and strategies encountered by a professional female author publishing in the ideologically charged space of the periodical press during the seminal period of transition from the Victorian to the modernist.