The present volume is a welcome addition to that Scottish literary criticism treating the long eighteenth century. Alex Deans on travel writing, Eric Gidal on ecological writing, and Michael Morris ...on "minority imperialist culture" provide modern critical context and remind us of a richness of potential scholarly reading unknown to those older critics stuck in the groove of one-dimensional Anglo-Scottish tension as definer of Scottish literature in the eighteenth century (300). Rightly, Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker argue that the period 1660 to 1688 is more interesting in Scottish literature than often thought, while never really connecting this period to the eighteenth century proper.
The first applied research volume in Scottish Romanticism, this collection foregrounds the concept of progress as ‘improvement’ as a constitutive theme of Scottish writing during the long eighteenth ...century. It explores improvement as the animating principle behind Scotland’s post-1707 project of modernization, a narrative both shaped and reflected in the literary sphere. It represents a vital moment in Romantic studies, as a ‘four-nations’ interrogation of the British context reaches maturity. Equally, the volume contributes to a central concern in the study of Scottish culture, amplifying a critical synthesis of Romanticism and Enlightenment. The conceptual motif of improvement allows an illumination of the boundaries (and beyond) of conventional notions of Romanticism, tracing its long, evolving imbrication with Enlightenment in Scotland. Exploring the holistic treatment of improvement in Scottish literature, chapter studies include work on agricultural improvement and processes of commercialization, polite cultural renewal and the cotton trade, an expanding print culture and spirituality in death rituals. Taken as a whole, this amounts to an interdisciplinary re-consideration of the central role of improvement in Scottish cultural history of the long eighteenth century, of interest to a wide range of scholars, reflecting the vitality of the exchange between Enlightenment and Romanticism in Scotland.
Throughout the twentieth century Scottish literary studies was dominated by a critical consensus that critiqued contemporary anti-Catholic by advancing a re-reading of the Reformation. This consensus ...understood that Scotland's rich medieval culture had been replaced with an anti-aesthetic tyranny of life and letters. As a result, Scottish literature has consistently been defined in opposition to the Calvinism to which it frequently returns. Yet, as the essays in this collection show, such a consensus appears increasingly untenable in light both of recent research and a more detailed survey of Scottish literature. This collection launches a full-scale reconsideration of the series of relationships between literature and reformation in early modern Scotland. Previous scholarship in this area has tended to dismiss the literary value of the writing of the period - largely as a reaction to its regular theological interests. Instead the essays in this volume reinforce recent work that challenges the received scholarly consensus by taking these interests seriously. This volume argues for the importance of this religiously orientated writing, through the adoption of a series of interdisciplinary approaches. Arranged chronologically, the collection concentrates on major authors and texts while engaging with a number of contemporary critical issues and so highlighting, for example, writing by women in the period. It addresses the concerns of historians and theologians who have routinely accepted the established reading of this period of literary history in Scotland and offers a radically new interpretation of the complex relationships between literature and religious reform in early modern Scotland.
Contents: Introduction, Crawford Gribben; Part I Contexts: Writing the Scottish reformation, David George Mullan; Language attitudes and choice in the Scottish reformation, Marina Dossena; 'The divine fury of the Muses'; neo-Latin poetry in early modern Scotland, David Allan. Part II Texts: Allegory and reformation poetics in David Lindsay's Ane Satire of the Thrie Estaitis (1552-54), Amanda J. Piesse; John Knox and A Godly Letter: fashioning and refashioning the exilic 'I', Rudolph P. Almasy; Theological controversy in the wake of John Knox's The First Blast of the Trumpet, Kenneth D. Farrow; King James VI and I as a religious writer, Astrid Stilma; Calvinism, counter-Reformation and conversion: Alexander Montgomerie's religious poetry, Mark S. Sweetnam; English bards and Scotch poetics: Scotland's literary influence and 16th-century English religious verse, Deirdre Serjeantson; Hume of Godscroft on parity, David Reid. Part III Reception: Political theatre or heritage culture? Ane Satire of the Thrie Estaitis in production, Adrienne Scullion; A book for Lollards and Protestants: Murdoch Nisbet's New Testament, Martin Holt Dotterweich; A few concluding observations, David George Mullan; Index.
Crawford Gribben, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland; and David George Mullan, Cape Breton University, Canada
Eric Linklater's 1934 novel
Magnus Merriman
is recognised as a comic triumph for its satirical treatment of the Scottish Renaissance and the associated contemporary Scottish nationalist movement. ...This article argues that
Magnus Merriman
has deceptive depth because Linklater offers frequently profound insights into a compelling point in Scottish cultural and political history. The misadventures of the eponymous Magnus have strong parallels with Linklater's own belated entry into the Scottish Literary Renaissance and his disastrous attempt at standing for parliament as a Scottish nationalist candidate. The novel showcases Linklater's idiosyncratic political doctrine of ‘small nationalism’, and his unflattering portrayal of the National Party of Scotland is coloured by his disillusionment with it. The doomed poem written by Magnus, ‘
The Returning Sun’
, symbolises the Scottish Renaissance, reflecting its shortcomings and the difficulty of forming a unified Scottish cultural identity. The character of Magnus himself embodies the lack of a single, coherent Scottish identity as a Scottish Renaissance anti-hero. Magnus's political and literary disappointments mean Linklater gives a pessimistic assessment of the relative failure of the Scottish Renaissance and the nationalist movement of the period. Linklater's irreverent examination of Scottish nationalism retains contemporary relevance.
Magnus Merriman
is more than just a hilarious comedy and represents a significant contribution to Scottish literature.
This article contends that although the 'golden age' of the English Catholic novel has received (and continues to attract) ample critical attention, there is much still to be gleaned about ...contemporaneous Scottish Catholic literary works. In presenting George Scott-Moncrieff's Death's Bright Shadow (1948) as a case study, the article identifies a distinctively Scottish Catholic and nationalist imagination, which nonetheless owes much to the conventions of the French Catholic Literary Revival, as well as celebrated works by Greene and Waugh. Ultimately, the article suggests that political nationalism is a key feature of work produced by Scottish converts of the early to mid-twentieth century. It proposes that the geographical, cultural and political realities of place which inform the twentieth-century Catholic novel are a notable, if relatively under-explored, part of Scottish Catholic fiction.
Jordan discusses three unpublished letters by Thomas Carlyle and his role in the establishment of the London Library. "A decidedly good Library of good books", Carlyle (1795-1881) told a packed ...meeting at the Freemasons' Tavern on June 24, 1840, "is a crying want in this great London". As Carlyle explained elsewhere in his speech, the problems with the British Museum were that it was open only during business hours, it was overcrowded, and it did not allow readers to borrow books, whereas the problem with "Circulating Libraries" was that they pandered merely to "the prurient appetite of the great million". As such, there was a pressing need for a high-quality lending library.
The cultural profile of the literary haut lieu that is Edinburgh is marked by a strong interest in the violent history of the city, specifically, in its legacy of crime. This legacy is preserved in a ...variety of material and immaterial archives, including a substantial body of fictional and non-fictional literature, and inscribed in the Edinburgh cityscape. It is also commodified so as to attract the international tourist trade. Using as its prime example Ian Rankin’s 2001 Rebus novel The Falls, this paper sketches the cultural history of one notorious criminal case, that of William Burke and William Hare. In particular, it discusses the spatio-temporal referentiality of texts about Burke and Hare and situates them in the wider context of the Scottish literary tradition.
Among the unauthorised Glasgow editions that first published Burns's 'reserved canon', Thomas Stewart's Poems Ascribed to Robert Burns... Not Contained in Any Edition Hitherto Published (Glasgow, ...1801) has a special significance. This short article describes a previously unnoticed Edinburgh issue of Stewart's book, from 1809, and explores Walter Scott's connection with the book's reappearance, when Ballantyne and Co. bought unsold sheets of the Glasgow second issue, put copies in a further variant binding, and advertised it in their own catalogue, quoting praise from Walter Scott, the firm's unacknowledged majority shareholder, for Burns's 'contraband' poems, notably 'Holy Willie's Prayer' and 'The Jolly Beggars'. Some cheap Edinburgh editions had previously reprinted pirated poems, but Ballantyne's reissue, known only in one privately-owned copy, and Scott's comments, mark the first endorsement of the Glasgow piracies by the Edinburgh publishing establishment.
This innovative book proposes the expansion of the existing idea of an interwar Scottish Renaissance movement to include its international significance as a Scottish literary modernism interacting ...with the intellectual and artistic ideas of European modernism as well as responding to the challenges of the Scottish cultural and political context.
Introduction–Time for Reading Lynch, Deidre Shauna; Ender, Evelyne
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
10/2018, Letnik:
133, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Watching someone else get lost in a book and become riveted by its words or story is a baffling and estranging experience, one of "an almost primal exclusion". Barred from an unmediated knowledge of ...the content of that response, people are limited to in...ferring that reading is happening. Ali Smith is one of several contemporary fic...tion writers who take an interest in the condi...tions in which (their) readers read now.
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