Academic literature on the topic 'Scottish author'

This article explores the questions associated with the latter three days in the novels “Princess Mary” saturated with dramatic events: duel with Grushnitsky, breach in friendship with Dr. Werner, Vera’s departure, farewell to Princess Mary. Special attention is given the text, referred to as narrative interlude, which reflects the night and early morning events before the duel. The text is comprised of a lyrical part (from 2 am on June 17 to Pechorin's exclamation “amusing and upsetting”); the story continues in reminiscences of the hero a month and a half later in a different stylistic reflection. The author examines literary motifs underlying the decision of Lermontov to describe the events of the night before duel using different genre and styles – lyrical confession and novel narration, and believes that one of the key factors for understanding Lermontov’s plot lies in replacement of Walter Scott's novels for Pechorin’s night reading (“The Fortunes of Nigel” with “The Scottish Puritans”). According to the author, the novel “Scottish Puritans” is similar to the finale of “Princess Mary”. For substantiating this thesis,, the article focuses on the original title of the novel – “Old Morality”, translated into French as “The Scottish Puritans” and into Russian – “The Puritans”. It is assumed that the meaning of Scottish title was understandable to Lermontov; thus the author suggests a congenial collocation – "the frail dust". Events of the finale should be comprehended as a purifying catastrophe; its artistic idea meets requirement of the time – describe birth of a Christian person as a new stage of spiritual evolution.

The author analyses the major changes to the political ideology and policy platform of the stateless nation's movement in Western European postindustrial states, taking the Scottish National Party as an special example. The analysis starts with the evolution of the Anglo-Scottish relations beginning from the creation of Union of English and Scottish kingdoms by the Act of Union in 1707. Author then presents the contemporary relationship between these two provinces of the United Kingdom. He stresses that since 1990s, the Scottish national movement have been pursuing the 'silent constitutional revolution' of this multinational community, which means using the most of globalization, the European integration process, and the so called devolution, to maximize the autonomy of Scotland within the United Kingdom.

The paper discusses the influence of Walter Scotts historical novels on the formation of national identity of Scotland at the turn of the eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. In the current geopolitical situation, considering the growing wave of separatism, the relevance of the study of national identity formation process cannot be overemphasized. In the paper the author analyzes the historical preconditions of Scots national consciousness formation. The author also considers characteristics of historical and cultural development of the region. According to the author, James MacPherson and Bishop Percys works were equally important for national disunity overcoming in Scotland and Britain as a whole. Particular attention is drawn to the role of Sir Walter Scott in the process of national revival in Scotland. Such novels as Waverley, Puritans, and Rob Roy introduced the general public with the mental basis of the Scottish people. Having opened national character features and religious foundations of the Scottish worldview for a wide range of readers, the author awakened the interest of the British society to the heritage of Scotland, thereby laying the basis for a successful integration of the two peoples into a single nation. Sir Walter Scott managed to revive national prestige of Scotland that had fallen victim after the signing of Union in 1707.

This study examines the personal account books of Sir Walter Scott, the world-renowned Scottish author, a topic not explored before by Scott scholars or accounting historians. It sets the account books in the context of Scott's accounting education and experience, which took place at the time of the Scottish Enlightenment, an 18th century movement which saw a great flowering of writings on accountancy in Scotland as well as considerable progress in the arts and sciences. The style, layout and content of the account books is also studied from the point of view of elucidating Scott's domestic financial arrangements and expenditure patterns. These are seen as confirming the insights of Vickery [1998], who posits a liberated role for women such as Mrs Scott in ‘genteel’ households, which Scott's undoubtedly was. The study also establishes that Scott's personal expenditures, and indeed his accounting practices, otherwise conformed to the general patriarchal pattern identified by Davidoff and Hall [1987]. The final part of the article uses what has been discovered about Scott's personal accounting to revisit the question of his financial imprudence (or otherwise) in business. It concludes that Scott's risk-taking in business was not unreasonable, and was informed by his bookkeeping knowledge and practices.

Newtonian science and mechanics left an important imprint on the Scottish Enlightenment. Even though the usage of mechanical metaphors, especially that of a “state machine” per se, were rare in Scottish philosophy, its conception of the human, animal and political bodies as mechanisms that function according to regular principles, or laws, helped to shape many of the theories that have now become popular in various fields of Scottish studies. Most research in these fields focus on the conceptions of history related to theories of economic advancement. In this article the author suggests that the theories produced in the Scottish Enlightenment were also nuanced attempts to describe how historical mechanisms operate.

Summary This paper offers new insights into the 18th-century normative tradition, with special reference to the stigmatisation of preposition stranding. It brings to light the role of Scottish codifiers in contrast to English codifiers: works written by Scots contain more critical comments on the use of end-placed prepositions both quantitatively (in terms of frequency) and qualitatively (more semantic nuances and more condemnatory epithets). The semantic analysis of the data rules out the hypothesis that Scottish authors might have been particularly sensible towards this construction because of its nature as ‘provincial English’ or as a ‘Scotticism’. Rather, the author suggests that it was the ‘New Rhetoric’ movement (1748–1793) in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment that played a vital role in its stigmatisation. The importance of rhetoric as a facet of 18th-century prescriptivism, complementary to grammar, is thus put under the spotlight.

Even the most cursory browse through any slang dictionary will immediately reveal that rhyming slang is a highly productive category of word-formation in contemporary British and Australian English. However, because of the inextricable difficulty in tracking what is essentially an oral (and often improvisational) phenomenon, dictionaries have typically overlooked rhyming slang items whose use is restricted to specific geographical areas, especially in Ireland and Scotland. Conceived as a sequel and companion piece to a previous study on Scottish rhyming slang by this author (Lillo 2004b), this article examines the way rhyming slang has thrived in Scotland over the past few years, thereby providing interesting insights into its role in the articulation of Scottish identity and its spread and growth around the anglophone world. While Scottish rhyming slang shows largely the same morphological characteristics as other rhyming slangs, its home-grown flavour is apparent in a significant proportion of its repertoire, which serves as a real marker of national identity and pride among Scots. The final section of the article presents a glossary of Scottish rhyming slang made up for the most part of previously unrecorded items collected by the author.

During the nineteenth century, changing conceptions of mental disorder had profound implications for the way that criminal responsibility was conceived. As medical writers and practitioners increasingly drew attention to the complexities of insanity, the grounds on which mentally abnormal offenders could be excused began to seem unduly restrictive. By way of a contribution to our understanding of this development, this article examines how the growing disparity unfolded in Scotland. The author argues that the requirements of the insanity defence, as set out within judicial directions, reflect core facets of Scottish Common Sense philosophical thought, including Thomas Reid's view of human agency and understanding of ‘common sense’. Building on this contention, the author suggests that Scottish Common Sense philosophy played an important role in the development of Scottish mental state defences more broadly, and can provide an original interpretation of the way the doctrines of provocation and diminished responsibility changed during this era.

The withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union focused the issue of cleavage of British statehood by European criteria. According to the results of sociological surveys and polls, the distribution of preferences of Brexit is correlated with the national identification matrix. Most Scots and Irish of United Kingdom support remaining the membership in the European Union, while the most English defend soft or hard Brexit. However, the depth of such cleavage underlines the uncertainty in the preferences of citizens who identify as British in general. In the context of the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union, the question of the European identity of Scots was also underlines by Scotland's regional political actors. This article is aimed to the analysis of the dynamics of the European identity of the Scottish community in 2016–2020 under Brexit conditions. The author concludes that the share of Scots with European identities increased after 2016, and Brexit was a key factor in the dynamics. At the same time, the actualization of European identity among the Scottish community is connected with the pragmatic strategy of the Scottish community and regional political actors to neutralize the negative economic and social effects of Brexit and plays an instrumental role in the national and European political arenas. The article starts with an excursion to the issues of national identity in the modern United Kingdom in the studies of Western and Russian authors. Then, based on an analysis of sociological data, the question of the European identity of Scots was raised, as well as the role of the national identity of United Kingdom citizens in the issue of membership in the European Union. At the end of the article, author proposes the description of the position and strategy of the Scottish community on the issue of Brexit.

Historically, Scotland has sustained a remarkable level of avoidance in regards to discussions of race and racism, and analysis of Islamophobia in Scotland has been very limited. A recent book (one of only a few) which takes the Scottish Muslim community as its focus is Stefano Bonino’s Muslims in Scotland: the making of community in a post-9/11 world. But, the author argues, it obscures institutional racism and leads to dangerous conclusions. By relying on a number of assumptions and misunderstandings about ‘integration’, racism and ‘Scottishness’, Bonino ignores structural factors of institutional racism. The author sets Muslims in Scotland against more trenchant critiques of Scottish racism, arguing its conclusions are symptomatic of wider framed narratives that circulate within Scotland, situating the book in a broader discussion of questions relating to the reality of racism and anti-racism in Scotland.

The Author and the Shepherd: The Paratextual Self-Representations of James Hogg (1807-1835) This project establishes a literary-cultural trajectory in the career of Scottish poet and author James Hogg (1770-1835) through the close reading of his self-representational paratextual material. It argues that these paratexts played an integral part in Hogg’s writing career and, as such, should be considered among his most important works. Previous critics have drawn attention to Hogg’s paratextual self-representations; this project, however, singles them out for comprehensive analysis as literary texts in their own right, comparing and contrasting how Hogg’s use of such material differed from other writers of his period, as well as how his use of it changed and developed as his career progressed. Their wider cultural significance is also considered. Hogg not only used paratextual material to position himself strategically in his literary world but also to question, challenge and undermine some of the dominant socio-cultural paradigms and hierarchies of the early-nineteenth century, not least the role and position of ‘peasant poets’ (such as himself) in society. Hogg utilised self-representational paratextual material throughout his literary career. Unlike other major writers of the period Hogg, a self-taught shepherd, had to justify and explain his position in society as ‘an author’ through these pseudo-autobiographical paratexts, which he attached to most of his works (in such forms as memoirs, introductions, dedications, notes and footnotes, and introductory paragraphs to stories). Via these liminal devices he created and propagated his authorial persona of ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’, whose main function was to draw attention to Hogg’s preeminent place in the traditional world, and to his status as a ‘peasant poet’. It was on the basis of this position that he argued for his place in the Scottish literary world of the early-nineteenth century and, ultimately, in literary history. His paratextual self-representations are thus a crucial element in his literary career. Drawing on Gerard Genette’s description of ‘the paratext’, the authorial theories of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault (along with more recent authorial criticism), as well as autobiographical theory, this project traces Hogg’s changing use of self-representational paratexts throughout his career, from his first major work The Mountain Bard (1807) to his final book of stories Tales of the Wars of Montrose (1835). By reading Hogg’s paratexts closely, this project presents a unique view – from the inside out – of the specific literary world into which Hogg attempted to position himself as an author.

Since devolution there has been a wealth of stimulating and exciting literary works by Welsh and Scottish women writers, produced as the boundaries of nationality were being dismantled and ideas of nationhood transformed. This comparative study brings together, for the first time, Scottish and Welsh women writers’ literary responses to these historic political and cultural developments. Chapter one situates the thesis in a historical context and discusses some of the connections between Wales and Scotland in terms of their relationship with ‘Britain’ and England. Chapter two focuses on the theoretical context and argues that postcolonial and feminist theories are the most appropriate frameworks in which to understand both Welsh and Scottish women’s writing in English, and their preoccupations with gendered inequalities and language during the pre- and post-devolutionary period. The third chapter examines Welsh and Scottish women’s writing from the first failed referendum (1979) to the second successful one (1997) to provide a sense of progression towards devolution. Since the process of devolution began there has been an important repositioning of Scottish and Welsh people’s perception of their culture and their place within it; the subsequent chapters – four, five, six and seven – analyse a diverse body of work from the symbolic transference of powers in 1999 to 2008. The writers discussed range from established authors such as Stevie Davies to first-time novelists such as Leela Soma. Through close comparative readings focusing on a range of issues such as marginalised identities and the politics of home and belonging, these chapters uncover and assess Welsh and Scottish women writers’ shared literary assertions, strategies and concerns as well as local and national differences. The conclusions drawn from this thesis suggest that, as a consequence of a history of sustained internal and external marginalization, post-devolution Welsh and Scottish women’s writing share important similarities regarding the politics of representation. The authors discussed in this study are resisting writers who textually illustrate the necessity of constantly rewriting national narratives and in so doing enable their audience to read the two nations and their peoples in fresh, innovative and divergent ways.

This dissertation shows how beneficial the ideas of the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin are when used to investigate both classical and more recent Scottish writing. An exploration of how a desire for a Scottish literary identity early in this century became inextricably bound up with a sense of historical necessity and psychological division, known as the Caledonian Antisyzygy, forms the basis for the first section of this work. The limitations of this mode of thinking and its failure as a 'theory' are then exposed and compared with the greater benefits of Bakhtinian thought. Succeeding chapters lead the reader from the vision of an historically centered and 'fixed' perception of Scottish literature that dominated the early decades of this century, to one which offers the possibility of endless interpretation. Close analysis of works by Robert Burns, James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Hugh MacDiarmid investigate how useful Bakhtin's theories are for reinterpreting classic Scottish texts. The remaining chapters analyze works by a selection of contemporary Scottish poets and novelists (Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Tom Leonard, Edwin Morgan, Liz Lochhead, and Muriel Spark) in an effort to display both the continuity of a literary tradition and the applicability of Bakhtin's ideas of dialogic interaction and carnival response to recent fiction and poetry that is concerned with the preservation of unique yet pluralistic community identities. It will be shown how Bakhtin's work lends itself to the project of freeing cultural identity from the bonds of a linguistic, historical, and geographical determination that is based on sterile oppositional constructs.

This thesis argues that the term Kailyard is not a body of literature or cultural discourse, but a critical concept which has helped to construct controlling parameters for the discussion of literature and culture in Scotland. By offering an in-depth reading of the fiction of J.M. Barrie - the writer who is most usually and misleadingly associated with the term - and by tracing the writing career of Ian Maclaren, I argue for the need to reject the term and the critical assumptions it breeds. The introduction maps the various ways Kailyard has been employed in literary and cultural debates and shows how it promotes a critical approach to Scottish culture which focuses on the way individual writers, texts and images represent Scotland. Chapter 1 considers why this critical concern arose by showing how images of national identity and national literary distinctiveness were validated as the meaning of Scotland throughout the nineteenth century. Chapters 2-5 seek to overturn various assumptions bred by the term Kailyard. Chapter 2 discusses the early fiction of J.M. Barrie in the context of late nineteenth-century regionalism, showing how his work does not aim to depict social reality but is deliberately artificial in design. Chapter 3 discusses late Victorian debates over realism in fiction and shows how Barrie and Maclaren appealed to the reading public because of their treatment of established Victorian ideas of sympathy and the sentimental. Chapter 4 discusses Barrie's four longer novels - the works most constrained by the Kailyard term - and chapter 5 reconsiders the relationship between Maclaren's work and debates over popular culture. Chapter 6 analyses the use of the term Kailyard in twentieth-century Scottish cultural criticism. Discussing the criticism of Hugh MacDiarmid, the writing of literary histories and studies of Scottish film, history and politics, I argue for the need to reject the Kailyard term as a critical concept in the discussion of Scottish culture.

This study will explore the role of female authors and their female protagonists in contemporary Scottish and Nordic crime fiction. Authors including Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Lin Anderson and Liza Marklund are just a few of the women who have challenged the expectation of gender in the crime fiction genre. By setting their novels in contemporary society, they reflect a range of social and political issues through the lens of a female protagonist. By closely examining the female characters, all journalists, in Val McDermid’s Lindsay Gordon series; Denise Mina’s Paddy Meehan series; Anna Smith’s books about Rosie Gilmour; and Liza Marklund’s books about Annika Bengzton, I explore the issue of gender through these writers’ perspectives and also draw parallels between their societies. I document the influence of these writers on my own practice-based research, a novel, The Invisible Chains, set in post-Referendum Scotland. The thesis will examine and define the role of the female protagonist, offer a feminist reading of contemporary crime fiction, and investigate how the rise of human trafficking, the problem of domestic abuse in Scotland and society’s changing attitudes and values are reflected in contemporary crime novels, before discussing the narrative structures and techniques employed in the writing of The Invisible Chains. This novel allows us to consider the role of women in a contemporary and progressive society where women hold many senior positions in public life and examine whether they manage successfully to challenge traditional patriarchal hierarchies. The narrative is split between journalist Megan Ross, The Girl, a victim of human trafficking, and Trudy, who is being domestically abused, thus pulling together the themes of the critical genesis in the creative work. By focusing on the protagonist, the victims and raising awareness of human trafficking and domestic abuse, The Invisible Chains, an original creative work, reflects a contemporary society’s changing attitudes, problems and values.

My doctoral thesis focuses on the twentieth-century Scottish writer, Jessie Kesson, examining the effects of the cultural construction of gender from a feminist psychoanalytic perspective. Although my primary focus is on the detrimental effects traditional gender roles have on girls and women, recently published studies claiming that 'masculinity' is in a state of crisis are of particular value to my work. The reasons contemporary critics offer for this 'crisis in masculinity' vary widely. There are those who are convinced that women are to blame for abandoning their traditional roles as wives and mothers and moving too far into areas of society that are traditionally 'male'. This, they believe, results in a 'feminised' society that has an adverse effect on the development and well-being of boys and men. Those who support this argument generally believe that social, emotional and psychological distinctions between the genders are biologically inherent rather than socially constructed, and would prefer to see gender positions polarised rather than assimilated. At the other end of the scale are those who believe that the behaviours associated with traditional 'masculinity' are outmoded, fostering a form of emotional distrophy that is responsible for the increase in male suicide and autistic-like behaviours. Those who support this argument believe that males should develop a new set of behavioural traits more closely aligned to those traditionally thought of as 'feminine': traits like spontaneity, expressiveness, empathy and compassion. I have found the latter arguments exciting on two counts: firstly because an increasing number of male critics are joining female critics in acknowledging that many of the traits and behaviours traditionally associated with 'masculinity' are life-denying for both sexes; secondly, and most importantly, because these critics are echoing the findings of the feminist psychoanalytic critic, Jessica Benjamin, whose work I have found so stimulating. But, where critics have pointed to the problem ('masculine' behaviour) and recommended that it be modified to something more closely resembling 'feminine' behaviour, Benjamin has not only identified the source of the problem, she has developed a revised theory of human development, 'Intersubjectivity', which offers a positive and transformative approach to human behaviour. I examine Benjamin�s theory closely in Chapter Two, and make use of it in succeeding chapters. In May 2000, financed by the Bamforth Scholarship fund (with help from the Humanities Division of the University of Otago), I attended a conference at the University of St Andrews entitled 'Scotland: The Gendered Nation', which gave me a wider view of the concerns of contemporary Scottish writers and scholars. The paper I presented at the conference, "That great brute of a bunion!": the construction of masculinity in Jessie Kesson�s Glitter of Mica�, was published in the Spring 2001 issue of Scottish Studies Review. Following the conference I spent the rest of May in Scotland finding out more about Kesson and her writing under the generous tutelage of Kesson�s biographer, Dr Isobel (Tait) Murray, from the University of Aberdeen. Kesson wrote many plays for the BBC, and I was able to read Dr Murray�s copies of some of these unpublished works in the security of the Kings College Library, along with back copies of North-East Review to which Kesson contributed. In Edinburgh I visited the National Library of Scotland which holds back copies of The Scots Magazine containing pertinent articles by Kesson and her contemporaries. Then I travelled to those parts of North-East Scotland which feature most precisely in Kesson�s life and writing. My Scottish month was invaluable for its insight into the critical literary climate of Scotland, and for allowing me to reach Jessie Kesson imaginatively: through the boarded-up windows of the Orphanage at Skene; by the ruined Cathedral at Elgin; at the top of Our Lady�s Lane; and on the steps of her cottar house at Westertown Farm. [SEE FOOTNOTE] It was a privilege to trace Kesson�s footsteps and then to return to the other side of the world with a much keener sense of her 'place'. I would like to think this has carried over into my work, the structure of which is as follows: Chapter One gives a brief history of Jessie Kesson�s life and writing. Chapter Two focuses on Jessica Benjamin the feminist psychoanalytic critic whose work provides the main theoretical framework for my thesis. Chapter Three considers the expression of female sexuality in the novella Where the Apple Ripens, and the way society conspires to have it diminish rather than enhance a sense of female self-hood. Where the Apple Ripens is not Kesson�s first published work but, because it introduces the central concerns of my thesis through the experiences of an adolescent girl, I have chosen to begin with it rather than with The White Bird Passes and to work towards increasingly complex gender relations in succeeding chapters. In Chapter Four, The White Bird Passes, I look at the way Kesson depicts girls and women as instruments of male sexuality, controlled by a nervous patriarchy whose institutions (family, education, church) take away the promise of her female characters. Chapter Five is centred on The Glitter of Mica, and considers the consequences of a masculinity constructed around the destruction of 'the Mother'. Chapter Six considers the fate of the anonymous young woman in Another Time, Another Place, and examines the conventions of the social order that deny her self-definition. Chapter Seven also examines the social conventions that shape and limit the lives of Kesson�s female characters - this time in a selection of Kesson�s short stories and poems. In Chapter Eight I look at selected writers from the eighteenth to the twentieth-century whose work, in diverse and often contradictory ways, has contributed to an interrogation of gender in Scottish literature. This is not an historical and systematic survey of gender relations in Scotland; it is not even an historical and systematic survey of gender questions in Scottish literature. Rather, it is an impressionistic account of such matters in some selected Scottish literature - selected in part to cover some highly influential figures, and in part from Jessie Kesson�s more immediate context: feminine, rural, the North East. There is a place for such historical and systematic work, of course, and I hope that someone will do it. All I can hope for is that I may have provided some beginning but more importantly, that my work in this chapter will sharpen, further, an understanding of Jessie Kesson. I begin with the life and work of the poet, Robert Burns. As well as featuring in Kesson�s Glitter of Mica, Burns and his legacy are matters of influence in the gendered ideal of 'Scottishness' for both laymen and writers at home and abroad. Following Burns, I contrast the unconscious gender ideology which permeates Neil Gunn�s writing with the progressive awareness of gender issues that characterises the work of Lewis Grassic Gibbon and aligns the latter with Kesson�s. I then examine the idealised landscapes and sentimentalised characters of the Kailyard era and the hostile response of the anti-Kailyard writers. This leads into an examination of Hugh MacDiarmid�s poem, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. MacDiarmid, like Burns, was monumental on the Scottish literary scene and his efforts to rekindle the spirit of the primitive Scot through literature have made him influential with a smaller but equally significant group. What is of particular relevance to my work is that the ideal of 'Scottishness' fostered by writers such as Burns and MacDiarmid is heavily dependent on prescribed gender positions which promote the exploitation of women while rendering them subservient to men and politically powerless. It is from within this environment of gender-based Scottishness that Jessie Kesson and other women writers, were writing and arguing. Therefore, lastly, in Chapter Eight, I concentrate on those women writers whose work has the most relevance to the time, place and ideological content of Kesson�s writing: Violet Jacob, Catherine Carswell, Lorna Moon, Willa Muir and Nan Shepherd. The writing of all of these women is concerned with psychic well-being centred on human relations and/or self-determination and, of the five, the writings of Willa Muir and Nan Shepherd are considered more fully because of the particular contribution they make to my examination of Jessie Kesson: Willa Muir commented, both directly and indirectly, on gender matters. Nan Shepherd, quite apart from being a friend of many years to Jessie Kesson, wrote novels in which gender issues are entirely central. FOOTNOTE: I am indebted to Sir Maitland Mackie for giving me a guided tour of Westertown Farm, the setting for Darklands in The Glitter of Mica.

Andrew Michael Ramsay fut un intellectuel écossais du Siècle des Lumières, à la fois "aventurier religieux", auteur politique et franc-maçon. Élevé dans le protestantisme, il rechercha un équilibre spirituel et une doctrine plus conformes à ses vœux. Il voyagea dans de nombreux pays pour atteindre ce but et finalement trouva auprès de Fénelon, archevêque de Cambrai, et de Madame Guyon, adepte du "Pur Amour", un père et une mère spirituels. Sous leur influence, il finit par adhérer à un catholicisme de nature gallicane caractérisé par un appel constant à l’intériorité. De son œuvre, émergent quatre traités : l’Essai sur le gouvernement civil(1721) dans lequel il démontre que la meilleure forme de gouvernement est la monarchie absolue, héréditaire, de droit divin. Fervent jacobite, il espérait le retour de la dynastie Stuart sur le trône d’Angleterre. L’Histoire de la vie de Fénelon (1727) traite principalement des péripéties de sa conversion par le prélat; Les Voyages de Cyrus (1727), roman didactique, apologétique et politique, raconte la formation d’un jeune prince accompli, rempli de sagesse et de piété. Son ouvrage central, Les principes philosophiques de la religion naturelle et révélée (1749), communément appelé le "Great Work" ne parut qu’après sa mort. Le franc-maçon perçait alors sous le philosophe. Son Discours (1737) fait remonter les origines de l’Ordre aux croisades et, surtout, fixe les obligations auxquelles est soumis tout franc-maçon, qui lui sont rappelées au moment de son initiation. Cet homme, complexe, mystique et politique réussit l’exploit de faire changer radicalement cette organisation très attachée à ses traditions qu’est la Franc-maçonnerie
Andrew Michael Ramsay was a Scottish intellectual of the Enlightenment and was at the same time a "religious adventurer", a political author and a freemason. Born into a Protestant family, he undertook a search for spiritual stability and for a doctrine more in line with his aspirations. In this quest, he journeyed through several countries, and he eventually found in the company of Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai, and of Madame Guyon, an advocate of the doctrine of "Pure Love", a spiritual father and mother. Inspired by them, he finally converted to a Gallican variety of Catholicism which was at the root of his call to a life of constant soul-searching. From his work four treatises emerge: An Essay upon Civil Government (1721), in which he sought to show that the best form of government is an absolute, hereditary monarchy, based on divine right. As a zealous Jacobite, he longed for the return of the Stuarts to the British throne. The Life of Fénelon (1727) deals mainly with the various stages leading up to his conversion by the prelate. The Travel of Cyrus (1727) is a didactic, apologetic and political novel which relates the education of a young accomplished prince endowed with wisdom and piety. His most considerable work is The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (1749), commonly called the "Great Work", which was published posthumously. Here the freemason can be seen beneath the philosopher. His Discourse (1737) traces the origins of Freemasonry back to the crusades, and also sets out the obligations that every freemason must adhere to and which he is reminded of during his initiation. His success in radically changing this organization so deeply attached to its customs remains the lasting legacy of this complex, mystical and political figure who is Andrew Michael Ramsay

The decades before the Scottish Reformation Parliament of 1560 witnessed the unprecedented use of a range of different media to disseminate the Protestant message and to shape beliefs and attitudes. By placing these works within their historical context, this thesis explores the ways in which various media – academic discourse, courtly entertainments, printed poetry, public performances, preaching and pedagogical tools – were employed by evangelical and Protestant reformers to persuade and/or educate different audiences within sixteenth-century Scottish society. The thematic approach examines not only how the reformist message was packaged, but how the movement itself and its persuasive agenda developed, revealing the ways in which it appealed to ever broader circles of Scottish society. In their efforts to bring about religious change, the reformers capitalised on a number of traditional media, while using different media to address different audiences. Hoping to initiate reform from within Church institutions, the reformers first addressed their appeals to the kingdom's educated elite. When their attempts at reasoned academic discourse met with resistance, they turned their attention to the monarch, James V, and the royal court. Reformers within the court utilised courtly entertainments intended to amuse the royal circle and to influence the young king to oversee the reformation of religion within his realm. When, following James's untimely death in 1542, the throne passed to his infant daughter, the reformers took advantage of the period of uncertainty that accompanied the minority. Through the relatively new technology of print, David Lindsay's poetry and English propaganda presented the reformist message to audiences beyond the kingdom's elite. Lindsay and other reformers also exploited the oral media of religious theatre in public spaces, while preaching was one of the most theologically significant, though under-researched, means of disseminating the reformist message. In addition to works intended to convert, the reformers also recognised the need for literature to edify the already converted. To this end, they produced pedagogical tools for use in individual and group devotions. Through the examination of these various media of persuasion, this study contributes to our understanding of the means by which reformed ideas were disseminated in Scotland, as well as the development of the reformist movement before 1560.

AbstractThis introduction provides a brief survey of the evolution of data visualization from its eighteenth-century beginnings, when the Scottish engineer and political scientist William Playfair created the first statistical graphs, to its present-day developments and use in period-related digital humanities projects. The author highlights the growing use of data visualization in major institutional projects, provides a literature review of representative works that employ data visualizations as a methodological tool, and highlights the contribution that this collection makes to digital humanities and the Enlightenment studies. Addressing essential period-related themes—from issues of canonicity, intellectual history, and book trade practices to canonical authors and texts, gender roles, and public sphere dynamics—, this collection also makes a broader argument about the necessity of expanding the very notion of “Enlightenment” not only spatially but also conceptually, by revisiting its tenets in light of new data. When translating the new findings afforded by the digital in suggestive visualizations, we can unveil unforeseen patterns, trends, connections, or networks of influence that could potentially revise existing master narratives about the period and the ideological structures at the core of the Enlightenment.

The essay focuses on the modalities adopted by Magris in his novel, Alla cieca, to merge literature and civil engagement through a fine narrative construction. By populating his writing with precise documentary research and taking advantage of the possibilities of invention, the author succeeds in giving voice to minimum destinies of History and save their high moral lesson. This can also be seen through a comparative reading of the pages of the novel dealing with Tito’s gulag, Goli Otok, and Scotti’s book, which is a historical reconstruction provided by witnesses of the events suffered by Italians who lived there.

In the introduction to his 2001 anthology of ‘New Scottish Gothic Fiction’, Alan Bissett argues that Gothic ‘has always acted as a way of re-examining the past, and the past is the place where Scotland, a country obsessed with re-examining itself, can view itself whole, vibrant, mythic’ (2001: 6). While virtually every contemporary Scottish author has made use of Gothic elements or tropes in some part of their work, many of the most important recent texts to be labelled ‘Scottish Gothic’ are centrally concerned with such a re-examination of the past. For many authors, however, the past is not to be found in historical events or cultural contexts, but specifically in the interrelation between established Scottish and Gothic literary traditions. Beginning with Emma Tennant’s The Bad Sister (1978), one of numerous twentieth-century reworkings of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), many contemporary Gothic novels have explicitly relied on earlier texts; adapting the work of Hogg, Stevenson or even Shelley becomes a way of challenging preconceived notions of stable national and individual identities.

This chapter considers the Great War’s bearing on the rise of Scottish nationalism in political and cultural terms. Riach discusses these developments in the contexts of international imperialism, the Irish rising in Dublin, and most centrally in the Scottish literature of the era. Riach points to the international nature of Scottish literature in the pre-war era. Addressing the war’s role in shaping Scottish national identity, he notes that the devastations witnessed by Hugh MacDiarmid would underlie the vigour and ruthlessness with which he would pursue his vision for a Scotland regenerated. Riach, however, recognising patriotic unionist perspectives such as those of Ian Hay and John Buchan, concludes that the poly-vocal, multi-media and temporally mutable nature of the Scottish literary response to imperialism and world war cannot be reduced or defined to a single party, moment, poem, book or author.

This essay charts the misfortunes of Scottish merchant voyage to Newfoundland fisheries aboard the Christian. Author Olaf Janzen studies the correspondence of merchant Edward Burd Jr to determine that a combination of the crew’s inexperience of the fish trade, inability to meet the needs of the market, a cumbersome ship, and sheer bad luck, kept the venture from establishing what should have been a clear and profitable expansion of Scottish trade.

To this slight attempt at a sketch of ancient Scottish manners, the public have been more attentive than the Author durst have hoped or expected. He has heard, with a mixture of satisfaction and humility, his work ascribed to more than one respectable name....

This chapter explains how the author came to study house names and summarises the findings of the book: that house- names are ancient, that there is plentiful data, that house-names express historical social information, that they have held steady over recorded history with occasional addition of new categories. The history of the house-name Sunnyside is sketched out: it had a historic regional distribution reflecting the Nordic land-division practice of solskifte and crossed languages spoken in the region, so that traditional Scottish names in Green such as Greens of Bogbuie express Scottish Gaelic grian ‘sun’ rather than the English word green.

This chapter discusses Thea Musgrave's settings of nursery rhymes from her native Scotland. The poems are aptly projected, in music of an approachable style, with some rhythmic quirks, all in an unmistakeably Scottish vein. A young and relatively inexperienced singer will feel happy and comfortable performing them, and should relish the challenge of enunciating the dialect words. For the faint-hearted, however, the author has made a straight English translation, but this could perhaps diminish the bracing effect of the piece. The composer has set the Scottish words meticulously, so some of the translations do not roll off quite so easily in the voice. Moreover, a light, clear tone is appropriate for the infectious, dancing lines, and there is plenty of contrast in mood and tempo, making it a beautifully balanced item for a recital.

This paper explores the possibility of cursus monuments being located in upland locations in Britain. These rectangular enclosures date to the Early Neolithic, and are almost all known as cropmark sites in lowland river valley contexts. However, Loveday explores various examples where upland upstanding features such as field banks could have prehistoric origins and easily be misinterpreted. Evidence from three case-study areas in Scotland – Upper Strathearn and Strathtay, Nithsdale, and the Biggar Area – is covered in detail to suggest a context for, and likely location of, possible upland cursus monuments. This is then placed with an upland British context, and the chapter concludes with news of a recent discovery that vindicates the approach of the author.

Abstract Subsea export power transmission cables for offshore wind farms are being installed more extensively year-on-year due to the increasing demands for power output from renewable sources. With the increasing number of installations, the number of cable failures during installation has increased. One failure mode involves the temporary or permanent radial deformation of armour wires otherwise known as armour wire bird caging which occurs from a combination of twist, bending and compression loads which build up in a cable. This failure mode can lead to significant remediation costs and schedule delays for projects affected. In this paper, the authors present a method for predicting armour wire bird caging for generic installation configurations based on a review of the root causes from several historical bird caging failure instances. Various numerical models and analyses which simulate the installation conditions are described. The models simulate key response mechanisms including bending-induced twist and inter-layer separation within a cable. Cable loading conditions are compared with cable bird caging limits and the parameters which influence the onset of bird caging are identified. Based on a range of sensitivity analyses, handling curves to assist with installation are developed and a full-scale test validation programme is proposed. This work was performed for a project which received financial and technical support from The Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA), a collaborative R&D programme funded by nine leading offshore wind developers (EnBW, Equinor, Innogy, Ørsted, RWE, SPR, Shell, SSE, Vattenfall) and the Scottish Government.