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.
