Abstract: This article examines food and drink and the use of these themes in the poetry of the eighteenth-century Scottish poet, Robert Fergusson (1750–1774). By examining drinks such as alcohol, tea, and water, and the juxtaposition between Scottish and non-Scottish cuisines, I demonstrate the key role food and drink play in developing a sense of Scottish nationalism primarily in Fergusson's satirical poetry. Using 'The Sow of Feeling' as a case study, Fergusson's use of proto-vegetarian ideals is also studied for the first time.
Abstract: This article interrogates how the intellectual and political milieu of the 1960s informs Muriel Spark's construction of a society and character that subverts traditionally gendered roles through hierarchy, performance, and death in The Driver's Seat . It analyses the narrative's deployment of absurdist techniques – including écriture blanche narration, pointed historicisation, satire, a monde à l'envers ('the reverse side of the world') structure, and carnivalesque performance to reimagine the hysterical woman. Ultimately, the essay repositions Spark's novel within the conventionally male-dominated domain of absurdist literature, situating it as a pioneering work in dialogue with her second-wave feminist contemporaries.
Abstract: This article repositions Robert Louis Stevenson's poetry at the centre of his literary achievement by reading it as a formally adaptive response to chronic illness. It argues that Stevenson's so-called 'minor' verse develops a poetics of constraint shaped by the material conditions of intermittent bodily capacity, enforced rest, and disrupted labour. Across A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), Underwoods (1887), and Songs of Travel (1895), short, regular stanzaic forms convert bodily limitation into compositional principle: spatial confinement becomes imaginative dominion, mortality is reorganised as measured expectancy, and travel is transformed into a retrospective partitioning of time. Situating these formal strategies within the culture of nineteenth-century Edinburgh, a centre of anatomical science and clinical observation, the article proposes a broader conceptual parallel: where medical modernity divided the body to produce knowledge, Stevenson's lyric segmentation divides experience to render vulnerability endurable. Drawing on disability theory, it shows that Stevenson's poetry does not merely represent infirmity but calibrates itself to it. In this light, his 'minor' verse emerges not as marginal but as structurally innovative, converting bodily precarity into a durable aesthetic of measure, recurrence, and composure.
Abstract: This essay builds upon recent scholarship addressing the anthropological essays of Anne Macvicar Grant (1755–1838), particularly in relation to her Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland (1811). Permeating Grant's analysis of the supernatural in the text is the sense that she is part of a peculiarly Highland strain of a cultural phenomenon. While the generic requirements of the Essays might encourage the assumption that it sits in Grant's oeuvre as her most determined attempt at an unbiased, scientific, anthropological work, in many regards it is the text that best displays her impassioned, rhetorical campaign for the preservation and perhaps the renaissance of Highland culture. Relating to this issue and responding to modern scholarship, this essay extrapolates upon the general and potentially misleading positioning of the Essays as a 'Scottish' anthropological text. By comparing Grant's attitude to the supernatural in the Essays with Walter Scott's (1771–1832) Anglocentric scepticism, discernible distinctions emerge between responses to tales of spectres in the polite, Enlightenment-inspired Anglophone regions of Scotland, and the treatment of such supernatural occurrences in the Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland where Enlightenment discourse had not yet become all-prevailing.
Abstract: This article focuses on the treatment of emotional states and the expressive vocabulary used to depict them in the Older Scots romance, The Buik of King Alexander the Conqueror (c. 1450– 1499). It demonstrates how the rich language of emotion in this Scottish narrative poem is used for a new and distinctive portrayal of Alexander the Great, and his adversary, Darius of Peria, significantly distinguishing the text from its principal Latin source, the Historia de Preliis Alexandri Magni. This leads in turn to reflections on what the text’s exploitation of the emotional potential of its source reveals about its function and reception in late medieval Scotland in advising those in power and encouraging compassion in its late medieval readers.
Abstract: This paper provides the first systematic exploration of the manifestation of mutual subjectivity between humans and animals as embodied in Robert Burns’s poetry. Through an analysis of several representative Burns poems, ‘To a Mouse’, ‘Poor Mailie’s Elegy’, and ‘To a Louse’, the paper reveals how the poet endows animals with human qualities in his work, while showing the animalistic orientation in human characters. We claim that this cross-species perspective not only enriches the understanding of Burns’s literary legacy but also provides a new dimension to the discussion of ethics in eighteenth-century Scotland during the Enlightenment. By examining Burns’s unique insights into the relationship between humans and nature, the article highlights the continuing relevance of his work in contemporary debates on environmental ethics and animal rights. Ultimately, this article calls on academics to revisit the important contributions of Burns’s work regarding the interaction of human and non-human life forms.
Abstract: The fifteenth-century alliterative Scots poem The Taill of Rauf Coilȝear is rich in both natural imagery and comic scenes of mismatched social gatherings. It belongs to a popular genre of late medieval narrative, but this version of the king-and-commoner story is unique in its persistent metaphorical use of natural imagery to explore the gulf between nobleman and commoner. One of the most effective devices the poet of Rauf Coilȝear uses to dramatise and exteriorise the king and the commoner’s slowly developing understanding of one another is the theme of ‘wickit wedderis’. Moments of high and low visibility throughout the poem interrogate the possibilities of truly seeing one another, and they paradoxically enable new understandings between the king and collier. This study first explores the generic complexity of The Taill of Rauf Coilȝear and then provides close readings of three crucial moments of high and low visibility. The poem’s minutely observed weather-swept landscape provides an ecocentric textuality that obscures some truths but also allows for gained knowledge and personal growth, and levels the field, enabling a nuanced questioning of social caste and power, as well as a particularly poignant exploration of the ethics of fellowship.
Muriel Spark was obsessed with the Bront & euml; sisters, their house, their literary careers and their afterlives. Although critics have commented on the relationship between Spark's critical and biographical studies of the Bront & euml;s and her own emerging writing practice, few have compared them in depth. This essay classifies Spark, the Bront & euml;s, and their female characters as mythmakers, governesses, and tigresses, exploring female authorship and autonomy in the nineteenth and twentieth century and beyond. Spark engages with and imitates the Bront & euml;s' ways of establishing their literary career and fame, but she assumes a critical distance from the Bront & euml;s' solipsism and their self-mythologising process. Spark also moves beyond the Bront & euml;s' scope and discusses women's claims for their own agency in an increasingly globalised and mediatised consumerist society.
The fifteenth-century alliterative Scots poem The Taill ofRauf Coil3ear is rich in both natural imagery and comic scenes of mismatched social gatherings. It belongs to a popular genre of late medieval narrative, but this version of the king-and-commoner story is unique in its persistent metaphorical use of natural imagery to explore the gulf between nobleman and commoner. One of the most effective devices the poet ofRauf Coil3ear uses to dramatise and exteriorise the king and the commoner's slowly developing understanding of one another is the theme of 'wickit wedderis'. Moments ofhigh and low visibility throughout the poem interrogate the possibilities of truly seeing one another, and they paradoxically enable new understandings between the king and collier. This study first explores the generic complexity of The Taill of Rauf Coil3ear and then provides close readings of three crucial moments of high and low visibility. The poem's minutely observed weather-swept landscape provides an ecocentric textuality that obscures some truths but also allows for gained knowledge and personal growth, and levels the field, enabling a nuanced questioning of social caste and power, as well as a particularly poignant exploration of the ethics of fellowship.
