Explores the literary-cultural background to Scottish nationalism and how writers have set out in poetry, fiction, plays and on film the ideal of Scottish independence from 1314 to today. Publication ...coincides with the 700-year anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn and the lead-up to the referendum on independence for Scotland in September 2014.
Bringing together an international group of experts, this companion explores a distinctly Scottish Romanticism. Discussing the most influential texts and authors in depth, the original essays shed ...new critical light on texts from Macpherson's Ossian poetry to Hogg'sConfessions of a Justified Sinner, and from Scott'sWaverley Novelsto the work of John Galt. As well as dealing with the major Romantic figures, the contributors look afresh at ballads, songs, the idea of the bard, religion, periodicals, the national tale, the picturesque, the city, language and the role of Gaelic in Scottish Romanticism.
Key Features
The first and only student guide to Scottish Romanticism capturing the best of critical debate while providing new approachesContributors include: Ian Duncan (UC Berkeley), Angela Esterhammer (Zurich University), Peter Garside (Edinburgh University), Andrew Monnickendam (Barcelona University), Fiona Stafford (Oxford University), Fernando Toda (Salamanca University) and Crawford Gribben (Trinity College, Dublin) - who have themselves helped to define approaches to the period
This volume considers the major themes, texts and authors of Scottish literature of the twentieth and, so far, twenty-first century. It identifies the contexts and impulses that led Scottish writers ...to adopt their creative literary strategies. Moving beyond traditional classifications, it draws on the most recent critical approaches to open up new perspectives on Scottish literature since 1900.
The volume's innovative thematic structure ensures that the most important texts or authors are seen from different perspectives whether in the context of empire, renaissance, war and post-war, literary genre, generation, and resistance. In order to provide thorough coverage, these thematic chapters are complemented by chronological 'Arcade' chapters, which outline the contexts of the literature of the period by decades, and by 'Overview' chapters which trace developments across the century in theatre, language and Gaelic literature. Taken together, the chapters provide a thorough and thought-provoking account of the century's literature.
Key Features
The first volume of its kind to offer accessible and authoritative insights into Scottish literature since 1900Innovative structure allows for new ways of approaching Scottish writers and literary textsDraws on the most recent scholarship in the field from leading literary criticsIncludes a guide to further reading
This widely-praised book looks at the rise and fall of 'Britishness' in literature over the last three centuries. Arguing that for much of its history the subject of 'English Literature' has been ...bound up with an assumed English cultural centre, Devolving English Literature examines the literary construction and questioning of a British (rather than simply English) literary identity. Surveying eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers, including Robert Burns, James Boswell, Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle, Robert Crawford remaps literary history. He argues that Scottish and non-metropolitan authors left a crucial legacy to American literature, to the developing subject of anthropology, and to twentieth-century Modernism. In the work of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Hugh MacDiarmid and other Modernists there persist vitally 'provincial' as well as national elements. These continue to nourish the verse of sophisticated post-British 'barbarian' poets such as Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, Douglas Dunn, Les Murray, and Derek Walcott. More than that, they are bound up with the contemporary literature and politics of Britain after devolution.This second edition contains a substantial new chapter, 'Waving Citizens', which looks particularly at Scottish writing in the light of the political events that saw the establishment of a national Parliament in Edinburgh in 1999. Topics considered range from Walter Scott and European union to Trainspotting and right-wing politics. This new chapter argues for the need to read Scottish literature in ways that alert us not just to its political significance, but also to the breadth of its tonal spectrum, so that Muriel Spark and Kathleen Jamie are as much part of a redefined Scottish literary identity as are Irvine Welsh and James Kelman.Praise for the first edition:'A stunning book: original, extraordinarily wide-ranging, coherent, reflective, and strongly argued.' - Susan Staves, Studies in
