On 6 September 1880 Robert Louis Stevenson, staying with his family at Strathpeffer, met John Tulloch, Principal of St Mary's College, St Andrews. Stevenson talked about his deep interest in Scottish history and a plan to write a history of Scotland since the Union of 1707. Tulloch, who was himself interested in Scottish history and had plans himself to write a history of eighteenth-century Scotland, strongly approved of Stevenson's idea. Initially Stevenson pursued the project, but within a year he turned instead to writing historical fiction set in eighteenth-century Scotland. Tulloch also began work on his history but, unlike Stevenson, he did not abandon the project and worked on it to end of his life. Both men also unsuccessfully sought positions in the field of Scottish history, Stevenson as Professor of History and Constitutional Law at Edinburgh University and Tulloch as Historiographer Royal in Scotland. Stevenson's failure to win the post confirmed him in his career as writer of Scottish historical fiction but Tulloch's failure perhaps encouraged him to keep his Scottish history project largely on the backburner so that its only outcome was a series of lectures on the topic of ‘The Revival of Letters in Scotland in the Eighteenth Century’. Never published, their only surviving only record is summaries in local newspapers. Their shared passionate interest came to a subdued end for Tulloch and a triumphant one for Stevenson.
This article discusses the need for a first-line index of premodern Scottish poetry in Scots, Latin, and Scottish Gaelic: the Literatures of Older Scotland Database ( LOSD). Whereas most poetic traditions of Britain and Ireland have been represented in such a fundamental resource, and despite the partial coverage of Scottish poetry in the indices of neighbouring disciplines, a comprehensive bibliographical and analytical first-line index is still lacking for Scotland. We explore what resources currently exist for medieval and early modern poetry from Britain and Ireland in English, Irish, and Latin, and where Scottish poems have been included, how Scottish scholars are still disadvantaged because such resources cannot accommodate the literary and linguistic priorities unique to Scotland. We also reflect on the challenges of compiling a multi-lingual first-line index, and on the intersection between the three language traditions in literary history. The article responds to Priscilla Bawcutt's proposal for such an index (in this journal in 1991, though it was never realised), and updates her vision by means of a three-language approach, a revised research rationale, and report of a proof-of-concept database and proposed metadata scheme and sample entries.
John Gibson Lockhart at an early stage was commissioned with the task of writing the official biography of Walter Scott, with the dual purpose of establishing his reputation and helping clear debts after his death in 1832. The first edition of Lockhart’s Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott was published in seven volumes between 1837 and 1838, heavily influenced by its publisher Robert Cadell. A second edition in 1839 expanded the work to ten volumes, including corrections and new content. In 1842, a one-volume edition was issued, physically compressing the text in dual columns while updating references and footnotes. An abridged two-volume edition then appeared in 1848, again motivated by financial needs relating to Abbotsford. The abridged form finally entered the Everyman’s Library in the early 20th century and was last reprinted in 1969. Throughout the original editions, Robert Cadell’s commercial priorities can be seen to have significantly influenced the physical form, content emphasis, and timing of Lockhart’s Life of Scott, leading to the question as to whether any fully stable version might be said to exist, while raising the issue of how the work might be best revived for a present-day audience.
Across genre, form and multiple national borders, Michel Faber has spent his literary life evading detection, his oeuvre being marked out by a singular determination to keep moving. As he has said about his various major works, ‘I wanted to produce a radically different book each time’. Faber's emotional territory is unusually narrow and consistent; alienation, displacement, resilience, compassion and the consequences of its absence are recurring ingredients, as are an interest in how humans, animals and environments interact, each of these particularly evident in his breakthrough novel, Under the Skin, though the contexts in which these are explored are often so different as to make those common ingredients hard for the casual reader to detect. Faber lived in the Scottish Highlands for over twenty years from 1993, half a lifetime in which he went from being unpublished to being celebrated around the world, and despite his non-Scottish origins, within Scotland, for several decades now, he has routinely been recognized as a Scottish writer. This perception of Faber being Scottish persists even despite his move to England in 2016, after the death of his wife and most crucial collaborator, Eva. This article uses Under the Skin as a case study, examining how and why Faber has been considered ‘Scottish by Formation’.
Thomas Blackwell (1701–1757), a major, although inadequately recognised, writer, was professor of classics, later Principal, of Marischal College in Aberdeen, and author of three remarkable works: An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735), Letters Concerning Mythology (1748), and Memoirs of the Court of Augustus (1753–1763). Blackwell taught several leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, including Principal George Campbell, Alexander Gerard, and James Beattie, and he was an important influence on James Burnett (Lord Monboddo) and James Macpherson. The article considers his influence on the formal study of literature in the academy.
Despite Muriel Spark's professed interest in science, few critics have considered the impact of scientific ideas on her work. Drawing on archival sources, this essay examines the central role of quantum physics in Spark's first novel, The Comforters. Spark's working notebooks for the novel reveal that she understood its metafictional conceit in terms of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, as a dramatic example of the observer affecting the observed. As a result, by attending to the contemporary sources from which Spark drew her knowledge of quantum physics, I demonstrate that the novel's paradoxes of observation are significantly inspired by quantum mechanics. In The Comforters, as in quantum physics, an indeterminate reality is given shape by the mutual interaction of observer and observed. Because of this, all knowledge in the novel – including that retailed by the narrator – is perspectival and potentially fallible; and this, in turn, should cause us to reconsider the universally-assumed characterization of Mrs Hogg as the novel's villain.
From William Hay in 1754 to Julie Rotta in 2005, people perceived as dwarfs have deprecated how cultural preconceptions have marked them as Other. Recent scholarship in disability studies has emphasised the role of representation in the stigmatisation and marginalisation of dwarfs. This essay argues that Walter Scott, even as he deploys traditional tropes about how normates respond to dwarfs, individualises his dwarf characters – Elshie in The Black Dwarf (1816), Hudson in Peveril of the Peak (1822), and Nectabanus in The Talisman (1825) – in a historically informed project to humanise his dwarf characters. Scott's dwarfs simultaneously enact and resist the stereotypes forced on them by cultural perceptions and prejudices.
Famous only for her correspondence with the poet Robert Burns, Frances Anna Dunlop (1730–1815) of Ayr and East Lothian has been the subject of little research. Scholars have traditionally viewed her letters as mere documentary fodder for Burns's life and writings. This essay counteracts the outsized focus on Burns by analysing Dunlop's many comments in her letters on books and authors beyond Burns. Dunlop's overlooked remarks on William Falconer's poem The Shipwreck (1762) opens a window onto Dunlop's literary life, critical values, and reading practices. These in turn reflect wider practices of gifting and sharing books among gentry women in rural Scotland. Much of Dunlop's advice to Burns in her letters seems moralizing and wrongheaded today, but when put in the context of her sharing of and socializing with books, and also of gendered contraints on expression, Dunlop's literary comments are wiser than they first appear.
Nan Shepherd's writing is female-centred and imbued with a striking feminine sensibility described in this essay as wayward. Her ‘wayward aesthetics’ present dissenting expressions of femininity which effectively challenge traditional and normative world views, questioning and dissolving the boundaries of our internal and external environments. Employing the disruptive analytical approaches of Jack Halberstam's conception of ‘counterintuitive modes of knowing’ in their notion of ‘the wild’ as set out in The Queer Art of Failure (2011) and Wild Things (2020) among other texts, and the bold ecocritical critique of Donna J. Haraway in Staying with the Trouble (2016), this essay analyses Shepherd's richly unsettling novel The Weatherhouse (1930). It argues that read for her wayward literary sensibilities and intimations of ‘the wild’, this text resonates with rich insights into reconceptualizing and revisioning the human condition and relationship with ‘nature’, illuminating Shepherd's purposeful challenge to normative thinking and representation.
This is the text of the W. Ormiston Roy Fellowship Lecture delivered at the University of South Carolina on 23 May 2024 (explanatory footnotes have been added). It addresses Burns's use, in his verse, of the rhetoric of ‘Patriot’ opposition to the British fiscal-military state, and begins by describing this rhetoric and sketching its origins. As a model for understanding Burns's appropriation of this discourse the lecture then shows how this is done in two poems by Anna Barbauld. It argues that the value of this rhetoric for both Barbauld and Burns lay in its offering them a place from which they could address a national (British) public, despite their exclusion, by their gender and their social rank respectively, from the political class. The lecture concludes by considering two poems, unpublished in Burns's lifetime, in which he mourns the loss of this possibility in the aftermath of the French Revolution (‘An irregular Ode for General Washington's birth-day’), and notes the moral vanity in the enfranchised classes that it permits (‘On Glenriddel's Fox breaking his chain’).
This short history of post-World War II Scottish PEN, based on the PEN archives in Edinburgh and London, discusses Scottish involvement in the first post-War PEN congresses; the Edinburgh PEN congress in 1950, and Hugh MacDiarmid's protest against UNESCO's involvement; the Frederick Niven Prize, as an indicator of Scottish PEN's relation to current Scottish writing from the 1950s to Alasdair Gray's Lanark (1981); the Edinburgh PEN International Congress in 1997; and the role of the Scottish ex-diplomat Paul Henderson Scott in the 1990s in PEN International's policies towards small nations, ethnic conflicts, and minority cultures and languages, and in the creation of Makars’ Court, Edinburgh.
Notes the significance of the issue topic for SSL's founder G. Ross Roy, notes that C. M. Grieve was on the original editorial board in 1963, and discusses briefly ho MacDiamid has been treated in the journal over the past 60 years. Thanks the guest editors for assembling contributions that reflect current perspectives.
Explains the background for this special issue, Hugh MacDiarmid at 100, in the Scottish Revival Network’s conference in August 2022, which marked the centenary of Hugh MacDiarmid’s first appearance in print under that name in The Scottish Chapbook in August 1922, and then, before summarizing the themes of each essay, discusses ways in which MacDiarmid’s legacy and reputation have become central to the Scottish literary canon but somewhat marginal to canonical modernism,
Looking at Hugh MacDiarmid’s Sangschaw (1925), Penny Wheep (1926), and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), this article considers MacDiarmid’s use of science, particularly astronomy, in the 1920s. It traces known and possible sources for his scientific knowledge in books and periodicals, especially The New Age. It examines the image of light travelling through space, found in popular astronomy works by Felix Eberty and Camille Flammarion. It also compares his conception of the earth as a moving object in space with that found in poems by Thomas Hardy.
Provides the biographical context and publication history for Denis Saurat’s essay ‘Le groupe de “la Renaissance Écossaise”’, which included Saurat’s French translation of some MacDiarmid poems, describes the essay’s importance in the history of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, explains some shortcomings in Saurat’s perspectives on the ‘renaissance’ and MacDiarmid’s work.
Discusses the first published item, a short play, signed with the name 'Hugh M'acDiamid', and sets in its biographical and historical context just after the First World War and in the literary context of 1922 and international modernism, in 1922, viewing it as 'an encapsulation of its moment, and most importantly as an elegiac tribute to a friend,' arguing that 'Performing "Nisbet" as a play intimates the drama of fractured modernist selfhood implicit in the written text,' and concluding that it should be seen 'in the whole national context of Scotland finding a way towards a reconstruction of itself, a place in which a new ‘home’ might be made, by such characters as are imagined here, and those who come later: a purpose which remained MacDiarmid’s indomitable dedication.' [Ed.]
