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Turner, Kate. "The queer moment : post-devolution Scottish literature." Thesis, University of Westminster, 2017. https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/item/9zwvy/the-queer-moment-post-devolution-scottish-literature.
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This thesis investigates dramatic changes in the construction of Scottish national identity across the period 1999-2015; it identifies a move from hypermasculine Scottish identity at the end of the twentieth century to a queer national identity in 2015. This thesis argues that this is a product of the dramatic disorientation that Scotland encountered when it achieved devolution in 1999, as this moment disrupted the traditional means through which Scottish national identity was constructed. From this moment this thesis argues that the years 1999 to 2015 mark a period in which ideas of Scotland and Scottishness were overturned and made fragile. This thesis considers the implications of this within writing from Scotland produced between 1999 and 2014 in order to explore the consequences of this opened-up sense of Scottishness. As such this thesis explores, not simply how this writing represents Scotland but also how an overturned sense of Scottishness, combined with the varied and outward-looking themes of this writing, allows for an expansive reading practice that incorporates questions of globalisation, cosmopolitanism, and postcolonialism. The chapters track these developments through to the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and the landslide victory of the Scottish National Party in the 2015 UK general election and find ideas of a queer Scottish national identity amplified during these political events. This focus on Scotland evidences this thesis’s broader claim that, if nations are constructed then they can be deconstructed or ‘queered’. This is significant because the nation is typically understood as a source of hegemonic power; it regulates its citizens as a healthy body politic and also demands the protection of the nation against various ‘others’.
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Gairn, Louisa. "Aspects of modern Scottish literature and ecological thought." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14839.
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'Aspects of Modern Scottish Literature and Ecological Thought' argues that the science and philosophy of 'ecology' has had a profound impact on Scottish literature since the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, and relates the work of successive generations of Scottish writers to concurrent developments in ecological thought and the environmental sciences. Chapter One suggests that, while Romantic ways of thinking about the natural world remained influential in nineteenth-century culture, new environmental theories provided fresh ways of perceiving the world, evident from the writings of Scottish mountaineers. Chapter Two explores the confrontation of modernity and wilderness in the fiction and travel writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, and some contemporaries such as John Muir. Chapter Three suggests that ecologically-sensitive local and global concerns, rather than 'national' ones per se, are central to the work of Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and others, while Chapter Four demonstrates that post-war 'rural' writers including Nan Shepherd, Neil Gunn, Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown, often viewed as peripheral, are actually central and of international relevance, and challenges the assumption that there is a fundamental divide between Scottish rural and urban writing. Finally, Chapter Five argues that contemporary writers John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie and Alan Warner are not only reviewing human relationships with nature, but also the role writing has to play in exploring and strengthening that relationship, helping to determine the ecological 'value' of poetry and fiction. By looking at Scottish literature through the lens of ecological thought, and engaging with international discourses of 'Ecocriticism', this thesis provides a fresh perspective in contrast to the dominant critical views of modern Scottish literature, and demonstrates that Scottish writing constitutes a heritage of ecological thought which, in this age of environmental awareness, should be recognised as not only relevant, but vital.
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Newton, Michael. "The tree in Scottish Gaelic literature and tradition." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/22519.
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The tree is one of the most enduring symbols of Gaelic literature and tradition, displaying a remarkable continuity from the earliest Old Irish sources up to the literature of Modern Scottish Gaelic. Although the many manifestations of the symbol of the tree in Gaelic literature - the <I>axis mundi</I>, the Otherworld tree, the warrior-king as tree, the forest harvest, and so on - can be ultimately traced to the universal archetype of the Tree of Life, these many forms are moulded and expressed according to the unique experiences, traditions and physical environment of Scottish Gaelic society. The literary expression of the symbol of the tree is particularly influenced by the conventions of the 'Gaelic Panegyric Code'. This thesis is a survey of the appearances and functions of the symbol of the tree in Scottish Gaelic literature and tradition and an overview of the development of this symbol in its many contexts, literary and folkloric.
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Barlow, Richard. "Scotographic joys : Joyce and Scottish literature, history and philosophy." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.580301.
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This thesis examines how the work of James Joyce deals with the literature, history and philosophy of Scotland. My first chapter discusses the Scottish character Crotthers of the , 'Oxen of the Sun' and 'Circe' chapters of Ulysses and demonstrates how this character, especially his name, is the beginning of Joyce' s treatment of the connections of Scottish and Irish histories. Chapter Two examines a motif from Finnegans Wake based on words related to the names of two tribes from ancient Scottish and Irish history, the Picts and the Scots. Here I discuss how this motif relates to the divided consciousness of the Wake's dreamer and also how Joyce bases this representation on 19th century Scottish literature, especially the works of James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson. Chapter Three is a look at the function of allusions to the work of the Scottish poet James Macpherson in Finnegans Wake. I claim that references to Macpherson and his work operate as signifiers of the cyclical and repetitive nature of life and art in the text. Chapter Four studies connections between the works of Joyce and Robert Burns, studying passages from Finnegans Wake, Ulysses and Joyce's poetry. The chapter covers the use of song in Finnegans Wake, connections in Irish and Scottish literature and provides close readings of a number of passages from the Wake. The final chapter looks at Joyce and the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly allusions to the philosopher David Hume in Finnegans Wake. The chapter considers connections between the scepticism and idealism of Hume's thought with the internal world of the dreamer of Finnegans Wake. As a whole this thesis seeks to show Joyce's indebtedness to Scottish literature, examine the ways in which Joyce uses Scottish writing and describe Joyce's representation of the Scottish nation.
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Woolner, Victoria Evelyn. "Scottish romanticism and its impact on early Canadian literature." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5071/.
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This research considers the impact of Scottish romanticism on the construction of literary identity in the Canadas prior to Confederation (1867). I argue that early Scottish dominance in literary Canada, and similarities faced by both countries in defining a sense of self—including participation in a wider empire (or Union), populations divided by language and religion, and the need for a distinct identity in the face of a dominant neighbour to the south—all contributed to a tendency on the part of Canadians to look to Scotland as a model. Through an examination of early Canadian literature and on-going British constructions of the colony, the thesis considers the manner in which Scottish romantic strategies of literary nationalism are deployed and manipulated in the process of articulating a Canadian identity. Particular attention is paid to the works of John Galt and Major John Richardson, while tropes examined include the construction of landscape and settlement narratives, stadial histories, the historical novel, national tale and the depiction of a national history, and the manipulation of a romanticised Scottish military past in constructing Canadian history.
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Jackson, Joseph Horgan. "Devolving black British theory : race and contemporary Scottish literature." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2011. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/47746/.
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The ‘black British movement’ is a consolidation of a diverse range of political, social and cultural priorities into a collective. Some of the more salient priorities include the opposition to British racism and imperialism, a challenge to hegemonic power and the invisibility of white ethnicity, and the eventual annihilation of the race concept itself. To ‘devolve’ this movement is to acknowledge some vital shortcomings in its critical practice. Firstly, an interrogation is needed of the assumptions that underpin the term ‘British’, specifically within a critique of racism and its derivatives. Secondly, the movement currently fails to thoroughly spatialise black British critique beyond the urban ‘metropole’ of London, and to a lesser extent, Birmingham; for instance, to the ‘margins’ of Scotland’s political, cultural and social milieu. Here, Scottish devolution provokes questions of how black Britishness might have become co-opted into a broader legitimation of ‘British’ culture. Literature has been a key site of contestation for black British cultural theory. Contemporary Scottish literature ‘writes back’ to the British management of difference through state-led multiculturalism and nationalism. Equally, the ‘Scottish Myth’ of egalitarianism, racelessness and a laissez-faire expectation of civic nationalism in Scotland are challenged by texts which foreground Scottish racism, whiteness and ethnocultural nationalism. In short, the texts featured herein expose and renegotiate the political practices of race, racism and culturalism in the context of two discourses of nation: Britain and Scotland.
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Liddle, Helena Francisca Gaspar. "Thread of Scottishness : mapping the allegorical tapestry of Scottish literature." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6579.
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Scottish authors throughout the ages have linked their art to their nationality. When the contemporary writer A. L. Kennedy observes, 'I believe that fiction with a thread of Scottishness in its truth has helped me to know how to be myself as a Scot,' she pinpoints the value of literature for both her predecessors and peers. However, the idea of Scottish literature as an autonomous and coherent national literature is controversial. Questions concerning self-sufficiency, unity, and value continue to haunt the idea of a Scottish literary tradition. Many studies have attempted to address the stereotype of Scottish literature's fragmentation and its place as a sub-category within English literature; however, few critical works have considered specific literary forms as constituting a basis for the Scottish literary consciousness. 'A Thread of Scottishness' argues that Scottish literature uniquely sustains an allegorical framework traceable from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the present. Chapter one discusses allegory's history, definition and relationship with the reader. Chapters two, three, and four focus upon the specific theoretical strands of the Scottish allegorical form: nature, nationalism, and morality, respectively. Each of these three chapters begins with a discussion of works from the medieval period and follows the progression of the Scots' use of allegory through time. More modern works, including S. Ferrier's Marriage, R. L. Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae, N. Shepherd's The Weatherhouse, are shown to reflect the narrative traditions of medieval and Renaissance texts, such as R. Henryson's Morall Fabillis and The Testament of Cresseid, King James I's The Kingis Quair, and Sir D. Lindsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. Thus, through a consideration of the use of allegory within specific Scottish texts, I posit continuity for Scottish literature as a whole.
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Rieley, Honor. "Writing emigration : Canada in Scottish romanticism, 1802-1840." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cbeac4b3-cb79-4c22-a308-03be120d2c26.
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This thesis is a study of the representation of emigration to Canada in Scottish Romantic periodicals and fiction, and of the relationship between these genres and the little-studied genre of the emigrant's guide. Chapter One tracks the Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review's reviews of books on Canadian topics and demonstrates how the rival quarterlies respond to, and intervene in, the evolving public debate about emigration. Chapter Two examines depictions of Canada in Blackwood's Magazine and Fraser's Magazine, and reveals connections between these magazines' engagement with Canadian affairs and the concurrent reception of Scottish Romanticism in early Canadian literary magazines. Chapter Three argues for an understanding of the emigrant's guide as a porous form that acts as a bridge between nonfictional and fictional representations of emigration. Chapter Four reads novels with emigration plots in relation to the pressures of American, Canadian and transatlantic canon formation, arguing that these novels trouble the stark division between the American and Canadian emigrant experiences which was insisted upon by contemporary commentators and which continues to underpin criticism of transatlantic literary works. Chapter Five considers the relationship between Scottish Romanticism and nineteenth-century Canadian literature, a relationship which has often been framed in terms of the portability of a 'Scottish model' of fiction associated most strongly with Walter Scott. Overall, this thesis contends that foregrounding the literature of emigration allows for greater understanding of the synchronicity of Scottish Romanticism and the escalation of transatlantic emigration, offering an alternative to conceptions of Canada's colonial and transatlantic belatedness.
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Hutcheson, Louise. "Rhetorics of martial virtue : mapping Scottish heroic literature c.1600-1660." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5097/.
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This thesis investigates textual cultures of heroism in Scottish literature c. 1600-1660 as evidenced in a corpus of texts engaged with evolving concepts of martial virtue, honour and masculinity. It provides the first sustained analyses of four seventeenth-century romances – Penardo and Laissa (1615) and Prince Robert (1615), both by Patrick Gordon, Sheretine and Mariana (1622) by Patrick Hannay and Calanthrop and Lucilla (1626) by John Kennedy – and their trajectory within a Scottish tradition of writing that was engaged in a fundamental search for its ideal national hero. Over the course of this research, a series of intriguing connections and networks began to emerge which illuminated an active and diverse community of ‘martial writers’ from whom this corpus of texts were conceived. From these pockets of creativity, there emerged a small but significant body of writers who shared not just a military career but often patronage, experience of service in Europe and a literary interest in what I will define in this thesis as the search for post-Union (1603) Scottish male identity. What began as a study of romance texts was prompted to seek new lines of enquiry across a wide and varied body of texts as it sought to engage with a changeable but distinctive thematic discourse of martial heroism, conduct literature for young men disguised as romance. Its findings are by no means always finite; a partly speculative attempt is made to illuminate the path of one particularly pervasive thread of literary discourse – martial virtue – rather than to lay false claims to homogeneity. The nature of this enquiry means that the thesis examines a vast array of texts, including the fictional romances mentioned above and others such as Sir George Mackenzie’s Aretina; Or, the Serious Romance (1660) and John Barclay’s Argenis (1621), non-fictional texts such as Robert Munro’s The Expedition (1638), George Lauder’s The Scottish Soldier (1629) and James Hume’s Pantaleonis Vaticinia Satyra (1633), and their engagement with issues of martial service. It is, in essence, a study of the seventeenth-century Scottish literary hero, sought naturally at first among the epic and fantastical landscapes of fictional romance, but pursued further into the martial world inhabited by its authors, patrons, and, as will be argued, its readers. In mapping this hitherto neglected topic and its related corpus of texts, the thesis identifies a number of potentially characteristic emphases which evince the development of a specifically martial conversation in seventeenth-century Scotland. It foregrounds the re-emergence of feudal narratives of male identity in the wake of the 1603 Union of the Crowns and after the outbreak of Civil and European war, in which the martial warrior of Brucian romance emerges once again as an ideal model of heroism – the natural antithesis to the more (self-evidently) courtly romance narratives produced at the Stuart court in London. Coupled with the inheritance of a late-fifteenth and sixteenth-century poetics which foregrounds reading as an act of moral investment (from which later writers appear to select the specifically reader-focused aspects of Christian Humanism), the erudite soldier and his corresponding literary protagonist begin to emerge as the foremost Scottish hero in a selection of both fictive and non-fictive texts, from vernacular romance to memoirs and chronicles, and in prose fiction. Across this diverse corpus of texts, collective emphases upon the moral investment of reading, exemplar-based use of historical materials and Scotland’s martial past emerge as a shared advisory paradigm, a conduct book of behaviours for the young Scottish male.
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Carruthers, Gerard Charles. "The invention of Scottish literature during the long eighteenth century." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2001. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1181/.
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"The invention of Scottish Literature During the Long Eighteenth Century" examines the limited place in the canon traditionally allowed to creative writing in Scotland during this period and the overarching reading of creative impediment applied to it in the light of Scotland's fraught and not easily to be homogenised national history and identity. It interrogates the dominant mode of what it terms the Scottish literary critical tradition and funds this tradition to have many shortcomings as a result of its prioritising of literary and cultural holism. In examining the Scots poetry revival of the eighteenth century the thesis challenges the traditional identification of a populist and beset mode, and finds eighteenth-century poetry in Scots to be actually much more catholic in its literary connections. These more catholic "British" connections are reappraised alongside the distinctively Scottish accents of the poets Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns. The poetry of James Thomson, it is also argued, fits more easily into a heterogeneous Scottish identity than is sometimes thought and the work of Thomson is connected with the poets in Scots to show a network of influence and allegiance which is more coherent than has been traditionally allowed. Similarly, the primitivist agenda of the Scottish Enlightenment in creative literature is examined to demonstrate the way in which this provides license for reclaiming elements of the historically fraught or "backward" Scottish identity (thus an essentially conservative, patriotic element within the Scottish Enlightenment cultural voice is emphasised.). Also, with the writers of poetry in Scots, as well as with Thomson, and with those whose work comes under the intellectual sponsorship of Enlightenment primitivism such as Tobias Smollett, James Macpherson, James Beattie and others we chart a movement from the age of Augustanism and neoclassicism to that of sensibility and proto-Romanticism. From Burns' work to that of Walter Scott, John Galt and James Hogg we highlight Scottish writers making creative capital from the difficult and fractured Scottish identity and seeing this identity, as, in part, reflecting cultural tensions and fractures which are more widely coined furth of their own country. The connecting threads of the thesis are those narratives in Scottish literature of the period which show the retrieval and analysis of seemingly lost or receding elements of Scottish identity. Creative innovation and re-energisation rather than surrender and loss are what the thesis finally diagnoses in Scottish literature of the long eighteenth century.
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Mapstone, Sally. "The advice to princes tradition in Scottish literature, 1450-1500." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1986. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a93e3e2d-89ce-4d4a-bcbf-47aa24f93e5c.
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The regions of James II, III, and IV in the second half of the fifteenth century in Scotland saw a distinctive flowering of advice to princes literature. This is the first account of its kind to examine in detail the sources, arguments, and extent of political comment of each individual work. In particular it employs both literary and historical sources to reveal the largely unrecognized impact of continental, especially French, political thought, on a number of writers. The study opens with a consideration of the poem De Regimine Principum, a politically very forthright advice work, influential for a century or so after its composition. Chapter 2 deals with the writings of Sir Gilbert Hay, whose work shows clear influences from the continent, particularly in the Buik of King Alexander, which is also seen to have interesting links with De Regimine Principum. Chapter 3 discusses the romance Lancelot of the Laik, a poem less precise in its allusions, but clearly indicative of a number of recurrent preoccupations in Scottish advisory literature in the areas of justice and kingly minorities. The two following chapters examine The Talis of the Fyve Bestes, which gives a markedly nationalistic evocation of good kingship, and The Buke of the Chess, where Scottish advice to princes is seen at its least politically aware. In Chapter 6 advice appears in yet another genre, the devotional poem The Contemplacioun of Synnaris, where the wider associations of `kingship' with the nosce te ipsum tradition are apparent. Chapters 7 and 8 concern The Thre Prestis of Peblis and John Ireland's Meroure of Wyssdome, possibly produced around the same time, but presenting their advice in very different manners: the Thre Prestis adroitly worked and entertaining, the Meroure, highly theological and drawing strongly on continental writers, notably the sermons of Jean Gerson. In conclusion it is shown that through this context we can best appreciate the purpose and formidable execution of Robert Henryson's advice to princes fable lq The Lion and the Mouse.
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D'Arcy, Julian Meldon. "Certain aspects of Old Norse influence on modern Scottish literature." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1990. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.261379.
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The argument of this thesis is twofold. Firstly, it is to show that from the eighteenth century onwards Scottish scholars and writers have made a distinct and important contribution, hitherto mostly unnoted, to the dissemination of Old Norse history and literature in Britain. Furthermore Scottish writers such as Samuel Laing, Thomas Carlyle, and R.M. Ballantyne played a significant role in the creation of the literary notion of a Norse ethos which was to be a central point in the literary and journalistic debate in Scotland between c.1880 and 1940 on the relative merits of opposing Norse and Celtic influences on Scottish history, culture and society. Secondly, and more particularly, the thesis illustrates how this consciousness of a literary and historical Norse heritage in Scotland influenced many minor authors in Orkney and Shetland, and eight important Scottish writers in the twentieth century: Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Hugh MacDiarmid, Neil M. Gunn, John Buchan, David Lindsay, Naomi Mitchison, Eric Linklater, and George Mackay Brown. The thesis examines in detail the Norse-inspired works of these writers and investigates how and why they became influenced by Old Norse history and literature, what sources they used, and what effect this had on their work. The Old Norse influence is mostly notable in the writers' attitudes to the Norse/Celtic debate, their use of saga and skaldic styles, their knowledge and application of Viking history, their interpretation and use of Old Norse mythology, and a belief in atavism and contemporary applications of a Norse ethos. The nature of this influence on each individual author varies both in extent and form, but its existence and relevance cannot be questioned, and the thesis argues that this Old Norse influence has thus played an interesting and significant role in modern Scottish literature.
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Keir, Kenneth J. "The translating effect : Neil M. Gunn, psychoanalysis and Scottish modernism." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2012. http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=194785.
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Neil Gunn was one of the principal writers of the Scottish Literary Renaissance movement, the earlytwentieth century flowering of modernist literature in Scotland. Although some commentators have noticed the frequent mentions of psychoanalysis in his work, until now no wider study has been undertaken. In this thesis, I look at Gunn's interest in psychoanalysis in a number of different ways. This is down with the two-fold aim of first, providing a modern assessment of Gunn's work, and second, examining more broadly the history of modernism in Scottish literature. In the introduction, I propose an understanding of modernism based on the literary exploration of new theories of, in this case the mind. I argue that a complex understanding of the interplay of these new theories and literature serves better than a more simple concern with either intellectual developments or changes in literary form alone. In the first section, I look at Sun Circle and The Serpent in the light of psychoanalytic theories of 'primitive' psychology and the history of religion. In the second, I look at Highland River and The Silver Darlings in the light of Freudian and Jungian theories of personal development, regression, and childhood. In the third, I look at the way in which Gunn explores Freud's theories of the warring life- and deathinstincts in both The Shadow and The Lost Chart. I conclude by looking briefly at how Gunn's literary explorations of psychoanalysis link with the work of later writers such as Muriel Spark, Robin Jenkins, Alexander Trocchi, Alasdair Gray, Kenneth White and Alan Spence.
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Lehner, Stefanie Florence. "Subaltern aesthethics : tracing counter-histories in contemporary Scottish, Irish and Northern Irish literature." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/3305.
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This PhD thesis proposes an Irish-Scottish comparative framework for examining a range of shared ethical, socio-political and theoretical concerns, pertaining to aspects of class and gender, in contemporary Irish, Northern Irish and Scottish literature. My approach galvanises Lévinasian ethics with the socio-cultural category of the ‘subaltern’ in relation to postcolonial, Marxist and feminist theories in order to trace what I term a ‘subaltern aesthethics’ between selected works of Scottish, Northern Irish and Irish writing that show a specific sensibility to the social inequalities and inequities that are part of the current restructuring of the global capitalist system. My work explores how these texts engage with both the processes of political and economic transformation in the Atlantic archipelago, and critical-theoretical approaches which, I argue, show the tendency to subsume the specificity and intensity of subaltern concerns. The first chapter delineates key debates in Irish and Scottish studies, offering a critique of conventional applications of postcolonial and postmodern theory. I demonstrate that dominant versions of postcolonialism are analytically entrapped in the nation as a paradigm. Additionally, I show that for all its apparent celebration of difference, postmodernism reduces otherness to the terms of the self. Chapter 2 outlines the model of a subaltern counter-history as a theoretical framework for reading ethical issues of historicity on the basis of texts by James Kelman, Patrick McCabe and Robert McLiam Wilson. This engagement with history is continued in chapter 3, which investigates the desire to archive Northern Ireland’s recent past in the context of its peace process in Glenn Patterson’s and Eoin McNamee’s recent novels. The emphasis of the three subsequent chapters turns the attention of my counter-historical method to issues of gender. The fourth chapter evaluates the material consequences that the gendering of the imagined nation has on female bodies in particular. Whereas the focus lies here specifically on the Irish context, the following chapter 5 engages in a comparative reading of traumatic herstories in three Irish and Scottish novels by Roddy Doyle, Janice Galloway and Jennifer Johnston. The purpose of both of these chapters is to examine women’s experience of disempowerment and their struggle to reclaim agency. My last chapter then investigates the relationship between men, gender and nation in the allegorical imagiNation of Alasdair Gray and McCabe with specific regard to the turn to the feminine that has taken place in contemporary criticism.
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Angeletti, Gioia. "Scottish eccentrics : the tradition of otherness in Scottish poetry from Hogg to MacDiarmid." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1997. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2552/.
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This study attempts to modify the received opinion that Scottish poetry of the nineteenth-century failed to build on the achievements of the century (and centuries) before. Rather it suggests that a number of significant poets emerged in the period who represent an ongoing clearly Scottish tradition, characterised by protean identities and eccentricity, which leads on to MacDiarmid and the 'Scottish Renaissance' of the twentieth century. The work of the poets in question is thus seen as marked by recurring linguistic, stylistic and thematic eccentricities which are often radical and subversive. The poets themselves, it is suggested, share a condition of estrangement from the official culture of their time either within Scotland (Hogg, Geddes, MacDiarmid) or in their English exile (Smith, Davidson and Thomson). They can be hardly associated with established tradition, but rather they belong to what I define as tradition of 'otherness' - other from mainstream literary and cultural society, and characterised by eccentric forms and themes. The Introduction examines the notions of 'eccentricity' and 'otherness' in relation to the selected poets. Chapter 1, after outlining existing critical theories on nineteenth-century Scottish literature, reinforces the thesis that the dominant voices in Scottish poetry are radical and eccentric by looking retrospectively at some of the eighteenth-century 'eccentrics'. Chapter 2 focuses on the work of Hogg and Byron, the former as the original nineteenth-century eccentric, evincing strong links with later poets, and the latter because of the striking affinities between his work and personality and those of contemporary and later Scottish poets. Chapter 3 focuses on Alexander Smith and attempts to rescue his most interesting poetry from the simplistic categorising of his work as 'Spasmodic'. Chapter 4 on James Thomson ('B.V.') explores the innovative and pre-modernist aura of his opera omnia. Chapter 5 concentrates on John Davidson, particularly on his diverse styles and unorthodox ideas, which also look forward to MacDiarmid.
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Mitchell, Jeremy Hugh Sebastian. "Island of bliss amid the subject seas : Anglo-Scottish conceptions of Britain in the eighteenth century." Thesis, University of Southampton, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.243922.
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Dickson, Elizabeth S. "Division and wholeness : the Scottish novel 1896-1947." Thesis, University of Strathclyde, 1988. http://oleg.lib.strath.ac.uk:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=23757.
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At the beginning of the twentieth century, Scottish literature seemed to be stagnating. In the 1920s and '30s, a loose grouping of writers hoped to achieve a 'Scottish Literary Renaissance' - the name by which the period is known. They were interested in Scottish speech, customs, myths and traditions. By using this raw material in their work, they sought to emphasise a Scottish identity which, they felt, had almost disappeared. Novels often centre on the experience of a young, imaginative character who tries to combine artistic sensitivity with life in the community. This character is related to a recurrent figure in the Scottish novel generally. Usually he is morbid and unreliable but it is a mark of the optism of the period that writers see in this figure not merely a potential artist but also a potential leader. The background is described through George Douglas Brown's The House with the Green Shutters (1901) and other works from the early years of the century. Thereafter the Scottish Literary Renaissance is charted through the work of four writers: Eric Linklater, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Naomi Mitchison and Neil M Gunn. The use to which they put the figure of the young dreamer is noted throughout.
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Frater, Anne Catherine. "Scottish Gaelic women's poetry up to 1750." Thesis, Connect to e-thesis, 1994. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/701/.
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Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 1994.<br>Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Department of Celtic, Faculty of Arts, University of Glasgow, 1994. Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.
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Wiseman, Andrew E. M. "Chasing the deer : hunting iconography, literature and tradition of the Scottish Highlands." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/29423.
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Hunting inspired some of the greatest songs and stories of Gaelic literature and tradition - a theme which runs from the earliest Old Irish sources down to the literature of Modern Scottish Gaelic. This thesis examines the cultural history of hunting in the Scottish Highlands stemming from the late-medieval period through to the early modern. The three main areas covered are the iconography, literature and tradition of the chase. Many hunting topoi appear upon late-medieval west Highland sculptures, remarkably similar to those on earlier Pictish sculpture, which are complimented by the Gaelic literature and lore of hunting contained within Fenian ballads and narrative stories. The apogee of Gaelic hunting motifs are contained within panegyric poetry and verse of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, sustained in the main by a late manifestation of an heroic age. Such imagery reinforced and perpetuated the identity of the chief as the paragon of pre-modern Gaelic society, who was always seen as a hunter-warrior. Hunting themes and motifs are also prevalent within Gaelic folksong tradition. Although this overlaps in terms of content with the bardic imagery of professional poets, the vernacular folksongs offer a more emotive and direct response to moments of crisis or celebration. The scale of these great hunts in the Highlands, borne out by the literary evidence, from the medieval period onwards, reflects a complex matrix of power, patronage, politics and ultimately propaganda. As well as being a surrogate for war the tinchel, in Gaelic terms, was a seasonal mobilising of the sluagh, or host, who followed the fine, the Gaelic nobility. This enhanced their status while reinforcing clan solidarity in a shared symbol of sporting endeavour, by chasing the noble quarry of the deer. Notable, also, is illegal, or covert hunting which masked a complex deer-culture, and marked the familiar tension of exploiting natural resources by the many against the privileged few who tried to implement their inherited rights to hunt. Inevitably, superstition pervades much of the traditions of the hunt, as it would in any given belief system centred upon age-old customs. Hunting was an integral part of European culture, and it was a theme reflected in Gaelic literature, song, and tradition more evidently than in many other European cultures of a comparable period. This was because it reinforced strongly and perpetuated the idealised image of a warrior-hunter, the archetypal leader engendered within Gaelic cultural identity.
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D'Andrea, Paola. "Classical reception in Sir Walter Scott's Scottish novels : the role of Greece and Rome in the making of historico-national fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.722557.
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Farrell, Maureen Anne. "Culture and identity in Scottish children's fiction." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2009. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/902/.
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British Children’s Literature has a long and distinguished history. In fact it could be argued that in the late seventeenth and increasingly in the eighteenth century, Britain took the lead in developing a new kind of literature especially designed for children. The Puritans were the first to recognise the potential for material specifically targeted at children as a means of reforming the personal piety of all individuals, including children. As a result, educational, instructional and religious books for children began to appear followed later by books retelling myths, legends and oral tales and later again books intended to entertain and engage children at all stages of their development. Included as part of British Children’s Literature was the work of Scottish authors. Indeed writers such as Sir Walter Scott, George MacDonald and J.M Barrie produced works that have since become Children’s Literature classics and they themselves had significant influence on diverse children’s authors including writers such as Lewis Carroll and C.S.Lewis. Though the work of Scottish authors was included in British Children’s Literature, it was not recognised specifically for its distinctively Scottish elements. In fact, increasingly from the nineteenth century, it began to be labelled as ‘English’ Children’s Literature even though it meant ‘British’. Scotland had been a separate nation until the Act of Union in 1707. After that, even as a ‘stateless nation’, Scotland retained its own education system, its own legal system and its own national church. Scottish Literature continued to flourish during this period making use of English and Scots language, as well as Gaelic, to produce an illustrious and influential literature of world renown. As Roderick Watson has observed, “the main ‘state’ left to a ‘stateless nation’ may well be its state of mind, and in that territory it is literature that maps the land.” (Watson, 1995: xxxi) Since devolution in 1997, Scotland’s literature sector has undergone an unprecedented period of rapid, sustained and dramatic expansion, a process paralleled by the growing profile of Scottish writers internationally. During the same period Scottish Children’s Literature and Scottish children’s writers have not received the same attention, though their progress has been just as significant. In the year 2000 the Modern Language Association of America recognised Scottish Literature as a national literature, and presumably Scottish Children’s Literature is included as part of that, but it was not specifically highlighted. Even up until 2006, Scottish Children’s Literature was not generally included or even mentioned in Scottish Literature anthologies or histories of Scottish Literature. When in January 2006 the Scottish Executive unveiled Scotland’s Culture, its new cultural policy, it gave Scottish Literature a prominent place. At the same time this document also acknowledged the importance of education in giving access to and highlighting Scotland’s literary heritage. It became all the more important then to recognise the existence of a corpus of work that is recognisable as Scottish Children’s Literature existing separately from but complementary to English Children’s literature and which could be used in schools by teachers and read by children in order to explore and interrogate their own cultural history and identity. This thesis seeks to investigate whether a distinctive Scottish Children’s Literature exists and, if so, to identify those aspects that make it distinctive. Further, if Scottish Children’s Literature exists, how does it become a repository for the formation of culture, identity and nationhood and how does this impact on young Scottish readers? In order to carry out this investigation the study adopts an integrated, humanistic and multi-dimensional approach towards Scottish Children’s fiction. It draws selectively and discursively on theories of reading, reader response and close reading skills for heuristic purposes; that is, on methods that further the overall hermeneutical task of enlarging understanding of the phenomenon, though no particular theoretical approach to analysis has been privileged over another. It draws on a range of overarching theoretical perspectives that work effectively in illuminating the characteristics of particular texts with and for readers. As such, the study does not pretend to provide a specific theoretical basis for the reading of Scottish Children’s Fiction. The approach adopted requires an immersion in the narratives, making unfamiliar texts familiar in order to do the work of projecting a distinctive Scottish perspective. Given that this study is among the first of its kind, it provides a base-line for others to apply specific theoretical filters to Scottish Children’s Literature for further study. Using what cultural typology and the semiotics of culture would recognise as a retrospective approach, this study intends to identify children’s texts that are recognisably Scottish and which may be considered to form a corpus of work which can be celebrated as a central part of Scottish Children’s Literature. WATSON, R. (1995) The Poetry of Scotland, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.
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Hamlin, Sarah Elizabeth. "Poetic politics : writers and the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2016. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/8902/.
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This thesis considers the works of six major literary figures in the context of their engagement with the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. These writers are, in order of analysis, Edwin Morgan, J.K. Rowling, Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray, Kathleen Jamie, and John Burnside. Each has produced a significant literary oeuvre which is examined here in relation to each other's work and to the Referendum debate. The multifaceted relationship between literature and politics is investigated through the lens of the Referendum, utilising these six figures as interrelated case studies. Chapter One explores Edwin Morgan and J.K. Rowling in relation to each other and the concept of nationalism as manifested in the Referendum period. Chapter Two focuses on postcolonialism and the work of Alasdair Gray and Liz Lochhead in that same context. The third and final chapter is concerned with Kathleen Jamie's and John Burnside's preoccupation with ecopoetics, and how that concern overlapped with Referendum discourse. This thesis provides new readings of these six writers in the context of the Referendum. It sets out to establish that, while their published literary works are often connected to the spectrum of stances these writers took regarding the Referendum, these works need to be considered with respect to the nuanced attention all six had previously given to key themes of the Referendum debate in the decades leading up to that political moment.
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Anderson, Carol Elizabeth. "The representation of women in Scottish fiction : character and symbol." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1985. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/19671.
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Campbell, Alexandra. "Archipelagic poetics : ecology in modern Scottish and Irish poetry." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/9102/.
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This thesis examines a range of poets from Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland from the Modernist period to the present day, who take the relationship between humans, poetry and the natural world as a primary point of concern. Through precise, materially attentive engagements with the coastal, littoral, and oceanic dimensions of place, Louis MacNeice, Hugh MacDiarmid, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Kathleen Jamie, John Burnside, Moya Cannon, Mary O’Malley and Jen Hadfield, respectively turn towards the vibrant space of the Atlantic archipelago in order to contemplate new modes of relation that are able to contend with the ecological and political questions engendered by environmental crises. Across their works, the archipelago emerges as a physical and critical site of poetic relation through which poets consider new pluralised, devolved, and ‘entangled’ relationships with place. Derived from the geographic term for ‘[a]ny sea, or sheet of water, in which there are numerous islands’, the concept of the ‘archipelago’ has recently gained critical attention within Scottish and Irish studies due to its ability to re-orientate the critical axis away from purely Anglocentric discourses. Encompassing a range of spatial frames from bioregion to biosphere, islands to oceans, and temporal scales from deep pasts to deep futures, the poets considered here turn to the archipelago as a means of reckoning with the fundamental questions that the Anthropocene poses about the relationships between humans and the environment. Crucially, through a series of comparative readings, the project presents fresh advancements in ecocritical scholarship, with regards to the rise of material ecocriticism, postcolonial ecocriticism, and the ‘Blue Humanities’.
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Honeyman, Chelsea. "Literary and political governance in Scottish reception of Chaucer, 1424-1513." Thesis, McGill University, 2010. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=86824.
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This study posits an intertextual paradigm of governance, modelled on the interdependent nature of late-medieval Anglo-Scottish cultural relations, for interpreting Chaucerian reception by Scots poets of the long fifteenth century. These poets use Chaucer to enrich their own works in ways that advance an autonomous, self-governing Scottish literary tradition. Chapter 1, establishing context for the study, comprises two sections. The first analyses how Scottish chronicles (including Bower's Scotichronicon, Wyntoun's Original Chronicle and the anonymous "Scottis Originale") interpret selected details of English chronicles to suit Scottish interests; the second explores interdependency's importance to the eponymous heroes of Barbour's Bruce and Harry's Wallace, who defer to friends, monarchs and moral ideals in order to further their goal of Scottish autonomy. Chapter 2 explores the Kingis Quair's paradox of freedom through service, which applies not only to the narrator's liberation through service to his lady but also to the poet's literary emancipation through a transformation of motifs from Chaucer's Troilus and Knight's Tale. Chapter 3 examines how Robert Henryson's Moral Fables argue for a monarch's success through restraint; the Testament of Cresseid echoes this concept both in Cresseid's evolution from a slave of lust to a liberated penitent and in Henryson's creation of an alternative yet narratively consistent fate for Chaucer's Criseyde. Chapter 4 focuses on Gavin Douglas' Eneados and Palice of Honour; each depicts a dynamic in which Douglas' debt to Chaucerian works such as the Legend of Good Women and the House of Fame is matched by Chaucer's need for Douglas to perpetuate his legacy. Chapter 5 demonstrates how William Dunbar's philosophical, petitionary, occasional and courtly poems advocate self-governance as a condition for governing others; special attention is paid to poetry concerning James IV and Margaret Tudor's marriage, wherein Dunbar artic<br>Cette étude avance un paradigme intertextuel de "gouvernance," basé sur la relation interdépendante entre les cultures anglaises et écossaises pendant le Bas Moyen Âge, pour interpréter la réception chaucérienne des poètes écossais au quinzième siècle et au début du seizième siècle. Ces poètes emploient Chaucer pour enrichir leurs oeuvres propres afin de promouvoir une tradition littéraire écossaise autonome. Chapitre 1, établissant le contexte pour cette étude, comprend deux sections. La première section analyse comment les chroniques écossaises (telles que le Scotichronicon de Bower, le Original Chronicle de Wyntoun et l'anonyme «Scottis Originale ») interprètent les détails choisis des chroniques anglaises pour convenir aux intérêts écossais; la deuxième section examine l'importance vitale de l'interdépendance pour les héros éponymes du Bruce de Barbour et du Wallace de Harry, deux leaders qui déférent aux amis, aux rois et aux idéales morales pour réaliser leur but d'une Écosse autonome. Chapitre 2 explore le Kingis Quair et son articulation du paradoxe d'une liberté qui se trouve dans la servitude, un paradoxe qui s'applique non seulement à la liberté achevée par le narrateur dans son service pour sa dame, mais aussi à l'émancipation du poète dans sa transformation des motifs tirés du Troilus et du Knight's Tale du Chaucer. Chapitre 3 examine comment les Moral Fables du Robert Henryson soutiennent qu'un roi puissant, c'est un roi modéré; ce sentiment trouve un écho chez le Testament of Cresseid, qui suit non seulement Cresseid dans son évolution personnelle (d'une esclave du désir à une pénitente libérée) mais aussi Henryson dans sa création d'un destin pour Cresseid qui contraste mais complète le destin de Criseyde dans le Troilus. Chapitre 4 centre sur l'Eneados et le Palice of Honour de Gavin Douglas; ces deux oeuvres décrivent une dynamique dans laquelle la dette de Douglas aux oeuvres chauc
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Manning, S. L. "The nature of provicialism : Some nineteenth-century Scottish and American fiction." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.372632.
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Jackson, Ellen-Raïssa. "Cultural identity in contemporary Scottish and Irish writing." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1999. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2548/.
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McAllister, Brian James. "The Early Days of a Better Nation: Imagined Space in Irish and Scottish National Culture, 1960–2000." The Ohio State University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1371193431.
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Upton, Christopher A. "Studies in Scottish Latin." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2734.
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This thesis examines certain aspects of Scottish Latin, particularly in the period 1580-1637. The first chapter chronicles the endeavours of John Scot of Scotstarvet to compile an anthology of Scottish Latin poetry, based on the unpublished letters to Scot in the NLS. Both the letters and contemporary verse indicate that the project was under way twenty years before the Delitiae was printed and that John Leech was an important influence. Leech's letters to Scot highlight Scot's editorial reticence, confirmed by the alterations in Scotstarvet's own verse. The final product was more a reflection of the taste and ethos of the early 1620s, after which Scot apparently ceased to collect material. The second chapter documents the attempts to impose a national grammar upon the schools, akin to the Lily-Colet grammar in England. Attempts to provide a radical alternative to Despauter, firstly by a committee and later by Alexander Hume, were inhibited by the inherent conservatism of teaching establishments. The most successful of the new grammars, those by Wedderburn and the Dunbar Rudiments, remained as general introductions to Despauter. Evidence for the composition of Latin verse in schools and universities, both statutory and manuscript, is assessed in the third chapter. Active involvement in the practice by local authorities influenced the range and extent of verse being written after 1600. The poetry of David Wedderburn of Aberdeen, promoted by the town council, reflects that influence. The importance of teaching methods upon a poet's future development is most clearly seen in the verse of David Hume, discussed in the fourth chapter. Hume continually re-works and re-evaluates the themes of his adolescent verse, measuring them against the achievements of James VI, whose birth he had earlier celebrated. The thesis concludes with a check-list of Scots whose Latin verse was printed before 1640.
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Griffith, David LaMond. "George MacDonald's Lilith A: A Transcription." Thesis, Virginia Tech, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/31892.
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George MacDonald's last major work of fiction, Lilith, was published in 1895, but the first version of the romance was written in March of 1890. Lilith is an account of the unintentional journey of the protagonist into another world populated by both mythological figures drawn from the Judeo-Christian tradition and by horrific personifications of the psychological horrors of the protagonist's own mind. The story of Lilith describes the protagonist's experiences in this other world which bring him to the point of repentance.
<P>
The manuscript of the first version, known now as Lilith A, is housed in the British Library along with seven other typed revisions and printer's proofs. Taken together, the A-H manuscripts of Lilith represent the complete production history textual evolution of what is arguably MacDonald's greatest literary work. The body of this paper contains the 161 page transcription of Lilith A produced from the original manuscript and a microfilm photographic reproduction provided by the British Library.
<P>
The introduction of this paper outlines the history of Lilith A, describes it's similarities and differences with the published version, provides a bibliographic description of the manuscript, and outlines the editorial principles used in producing the transcript of the text. The introduction is followed by a transcription of the title page created for the manuscripts of Lilith by Winifred Louisa, Lady Troup, who was MacDonald's daughter and amanuensis. This title page is followed by the transcription of Lilith A.<br>Master of Arts
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Dyer, Rachel Louise. "Reading and writing in collaboration : dialogues with Scottish and Canadian women writers." Thesis, Lancaster University, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.340518.
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Clements, Joanna. "The creation of 'ancient' Scottish music history, 1720-1838." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2013. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4699/.
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This thesis examines the writing of Scottish music history from the 1720s to 1838. It concludes that the Scottish music histories written over this period were fundamentally shaped by the interaction of ideas about universal historical progress with ideas specific to the Scottish context of the work. Ramsay’s pioneering claims that Scots songs were ancient were supported by parallels between the features of song – simplicity, pastorality and naturalness - and ideas about the nature of the past held more widely. The contrasts he drew with Italian music and English verse further supported his claims in ways specific to the Scottish context. In the later eighteenth century the Enlightenment model of universal historical progress – simple and pastoral societies developed into complex and commercial ones over time - came to underpin the continued perception that Scots songs were ancient. This same universal model underpinned narratives of scalic development, and narratives of preservation. Contemporary perceptions of the place of the Scottish Highlands and rural societies in the universal model of historical progress resulted in the collection of more purportedly historic song from Highlanders and the rural poor of the Lowlands and Borders. These same perceptions also seem to have resulted in the differing use of written sources to create a picture of a gradually evolving Lowland/Border music history and a static Highland music history. Specifically Scottish destructive events were used to explain the lack of other forms of evidence of purportedly ancient songs in the past: the Reformation, defeudalisation, and the modernisation of the countryside form turning points in many of the narratives. Writers’ reasons for writing Scottish music history similarly reveal twin concerns with the universal and the particularly Scottish. In foregrounding the social and cultural factors which underpinned the construction of Scottish music history in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this study challenges the continued inclusion of elements of the present-day received view. In addition, in demonstrating the parallels between music-historical and historical writings more broadly this thesis enriches our understanding of Enlightenment historical thought.
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Royan, Nicola Rose. "The Scotorum Historia of Hector Boece : a study." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.320654.
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Maxwell, Cheryl. "The formation and development of personal identity in the Scottish novel, 1920-1937." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.361780.
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Eight novels of the Scottish literary renaissance are studied as novels of development. The novel of development, deriving from the <I>Bildungsroman, </I>is a sub-genre of the novel which focuses on the maturation process of a central protagonist. The eight Scottish novels and novelists studied are: <I>Open the Door!, </I>Catherine Carswell (1920); <I>The Quarry Wood, </I>Nan Shepherd (1928); <I>Dark Star, </I>Lorna Moon (1929); <I>Imagined Corners, </I>Willa Muir (1931); <I>Shepherds' Calendar, </I>Ian Macpherson (1931); <I>Sunset Song, </I>Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1932); <I>The Albannach, </I>Fionn MacColla (1932); <I>Highland River, </I>Neil Gunn (1937). Certain themes are identified as being of special importance to the developing protagonist: Family, Community, the Natural World, Sexuality and Gender, and Education. Novel-by-novel chapters examine how each novelist depicts the relationship between the protagonist's development and some of these themes. Connections between aspects of Kailyard fiction and these novels of the 20's and 30's are explored, in particular the 'lad o' pairts' motif. The development process for female protagonists is given particular consideration, relating to restrictions in society which inhibit female identity development. However, male protagonists are also shown to experience restrictions, leading to the conclusion that gender issues are more complex than most feminist accounts will allow. It is asserted that these novels contribute to contemporary debates about the condition of Scotland, especially as it affects young Scotsmen and Scotswomen. Furthermore, they reflect profound changes in Scottish society which took place in the early decades of the twentieth century, in particular changes in attitudes to sexuality and gender, and changes in family structures. The thesis contributes to the study of the Scottish literary renaissance by taking a new approach to the Scottish novel, and by prioritising personal identity as opposed to national or cultural identity.
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Riddell, Aileen M. "At the verge of their proper sphere : early nineteenth century Scottish women novelists." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.241736.
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Wallace, Gavin. "English voice, Scottish heart : a critical study of the fiction of Compton Mackenzie." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/19388.
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MacDonald, Kirsty A. "Spectral ambiguities : the tradition of psychosomatic supernaturalism in Scottish fiction." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2005. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1926/.
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This thesis aims to prove that there exists in Scottish literature a previously undervalued, or indeed, overlooked tradition of ‘psychosomatic supernaturalism’, which like other literary traditions, refers to an evolving constellation of texts with similar themes, motifs and techniques. It is widely accepted that the continued presence of supernatural elements is a common feature in Scottish literature. However, the modifier ‘psychosomatic’, a term borrowed from the field of psychiatry, designates those specific supernatural events or beings around which accumulate sustained doubt as to whether their origins are in the actual or the psychological. This supernatural/psychological tension – discussed but rarely analysed closely by critics – occurs primarily in fiction throughout the national literary history from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present day. The evocation of this tension is a subversive strategy, challenging realism and its associated modes of representation. Perhaps the most renowned example of the tension occurs in James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). However, Hogg wrote a number of equally significant psychosomatic supernatural tales, including the novel The Three Perils of Woman (1823), and the short story ‘The Brownie of the Black Haggs’ (1828). The start of the nineteenth century marks the establishment of psychiatry, and the underlining of the distinction between madness and supernatural forces, a demarcation that was previously hazy. This was something Hogg was fully aware of, and as a writer with a documented interest in the supernatural and folk tradition, and in evolving views on mental illness, his work forms the starting point for the thesis. The development of this tradition throughout the nineteenth century is subsequently traced. During this time ‘social realism’ is a prominent mode in fiction. There are, however, critical and subversive exceptions to this in the work of writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Margaret Oliphant and J.M. Barrie. The thesis considers their work, and then examines how this tradition is manifested during the period now referred to by critics as the Scottish Renaissance. Late twentieth-century manifestations of the tradition are then analysed, against a background of the increasing dominance of realism and its associated metanarratives in Scottish fiction, and mass media contexts such as film and television.
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Hepburn, William Stuart. "17 letters to my brother : a Scottish soldier writes home." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2015. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/6489/.
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This thesis takes the form of three linked works centred around the fictionalised story of a young Scottish soldier of the 4th Cameron Highlanders from the years 1938 to 1946. These three works are: 1. An epistolary novella comprising the 17 letters of a found manuscript. 2. A feature film screenplay adapted from the letters. 3. A reflective essay on the creative process. The fictionalized narrative is based on the real life experiences of a small group of Scottish soldiers from several different regiments of the 51st Highland Division catalogued in books, memoirs and in personal recollections. They were amongst the 9,000 men who surrendered at St Valery-en-Caux on June 12th 1940 , and subsequently escaped. Through a varied range of routes, they made their way back to Britain. An even smaller group joined the re-formed 51st, and after bloody campaigns in North Africa, took part in the D-Day invasion. On the 2nd of September, 1944, the battalions of The 5th Camerons and the 5th Seaforths returned to the scene of their surrender, and liberated St Valery-en-Caux. Their collective experience encapsulates one small but little known part of the story of World War II.
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Robinson, Jon. "Court politics and culture : their relationship to English and Scottish court literature, 1500-1540." Thesis, Northumbria University, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.422446.
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Neely, Sarah. "Adapting to change in contemporary Irish and Scottish culture : fiction to film." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2003. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7486/.
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This thesis examines the relationship of Irish and Scottish literature and film comparatively. The field of adaptation has traditionally centred around classical literary adaptations and the heritage film. Considering the increasing frequency with which contemporary novelists are adapted to film, it comes as a surprise that very little analysis has extended beyond the pages of the general media. Recent Irish and Scottish films in particular have relied upon the popularity of their literary exports in order to boost their indigenous filmmaking ventures. While generally considering the dialogic relationship between the publishing, film and television industries, this thesis specifically focuses on the adaptations of novels and short stories by Irish and Scottish writers from the 1980s to the present day. Part one, focusing on the work of Irish authors, looks at Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal (Pat O’Connor, 1984) and Lamb (Colin Gregg, 1985); Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (Neil Jordan, 1997); Roddy Doyle’s The Barrytown Trilogy, comprising The Commitments (Alan Parker, 1991), The Snapper (Stephen Frears, 1993) and The Van (Stephen Frears, 1996); and Christy Brown’s My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989). Part two examines the adaptations of Scottish writers, including Christopher Rush’s Venus Peter (Ian Seller, 1990); William McIlvanney’s The Big Man (David Leland, 1990) and Dreaming (Mike Alexander, 1990); Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996); and Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002). Rather than carefully consider the fidelity of the translation from page to screen, this study examines the cultural circulation of the texts in alternative media in relation to their adaptive strategies. The novel’s role in representing ‘Irishness’ and ‘Scottishness’ versus and adapted film’s mode of representation is also considered alongside the influence of the director in contrast to the author, in order to reveal all of the contributing components to the development of a national cinema out of a national literature, both key components of a national culture.
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Reid, C. S. "National identity in Scottish and Swiss children's and young people's books : a comparative study." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.356405.
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Wall, Brian Robert. "Inheritance and insanity : transatlantic depictions of property and criminal law in nineteenth century Scottish and American fiction." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/21707.
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Participants in the critical enterprise of “Law and Literature” tend to center their arguments on the question of literature’s utility to the study and practice of law. I focus instead on the reciprocal corollary: how can an understanding of law influence a critical reading of literature? Taking cues from discussions in Renaissance studies of law and literature and drawing on my own legal training, I assert that transatlantic literary studies provides both a conceptual framework for positing a reciprocal relationship between law and literature and, in nineteenth century Scottish and American depictions of property and criminal law, a crucial test case for this exploration by uncovering new “legal fictions” within these texts. I begin my first chapter by situating my work within recent critical work in Law and Literature. While most scholarship in the “law in literature” subcategory since James Boyd White’s influential 1973 text The Legal Imagination has focused on how (and if) literary studies can help current and future legal practitioners through what Maria Aristodemou calls “instrumental” and “humanistic” mechanisms, recent work, particularly by a dedicated group of interdisciplinary scholars in Renaissance studies, has focused on the law’s benefit to literary studies in this field. I explore the critical mechanisms employed by these scholars as well as by scholars in nineteenth century literary studies such as Ian Ward. I then turn to transatlantic literary studies, arguing that the approaches outlined by Susan Manning, Joselyn Almeida, and others provide a framework that can give nineteenth-century literary studies a similar framework to that proposed by Aristodemou: an “instrumental” method of giving greater precision to discussions of how historical institutions and hierarchies are depicted in nineteenth century literature, and a “humanistic” method of extending beyond historicist approaches to see beyond the often artificial demarcations of literary period and genre by finding commonalities that transcend disciplinary and historical borders. I conclude this introduction by identifying the legal and literary parameters of my project in the legal-political tensions of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Scotland and America. My second chapter focuses on property law and the question of inheritance, reading Walter Scott’s Rob Roy and The Bride of Lammermoor alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables to demonstrate how the narratives play with two dueling theories of inheritance law – meritocratic and feudal – and how those dueling legal theories impact the events of the tales themselves. After outlining tensions between older but still prevalent ideas of feudal succession and newer but admittedly flawed in execution notions of meritocratic land transfer, I explore how Scott’s and Hawthorne’s narratives demonstrate the inability of their characters to reconcile these notions. Both Rob Roy and The House of the Seven Gables seem to demonstrate the triumph of deserving but legally alienated protagonists over their titled foes; both novels, however, end with the reconciliation of all parties through ostensibly love-based weddings that perform the legal function of uniting competing land claims, thus providing a suspiciously easy resolution to the legal conflict at the heart of both stories. While reconciliation makes the legal controversies at the heart of these stories ultimately irrelevant, the legal nihilism of The Bride of Lammermoor takes the opposite tactic, demonstrating both the individual shortcomings of the Ashton and Ravenswood families and the systemic failure of Scottish property law’s feudalism to achieve equitable outcomes. I next turn to the question of insanity in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and James Hogg’s “Strange Letter of a Lunatic,” arguing that both narratives complicate the legal definition of insanity by showing gaps between the legislative formulation and actual application to their fictional defendants. After developing the different viewpoints towards criminal culpability articulated by the American (but based on English law) and Scottish versions of the insanity defense, I turn first to Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poe’s narrator, I argue, deliberately develops a narrative that takes him outside the protections of the insanity defense, insisting on his own culpability despite – or perhaps because of – the implications for his own punishment. Meanwhile, Hogg’s narrative, both in its original draft form for Blackwood’s and its published version in Fraser’s, paints a different picture of a narrator who avoids criminal punishment but finds himself confined in asylum custody. These two areas of inheritance and insanity collide in my exploration of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Frank Norris’s McTeague, where I illustrate the relationship between the urban demographics and zoning laws of both the real and fictional versions of London and San Francisco and the title characters’ mentally ill but probably not legally insane murderers. After demonstrating Stevenson’s and Norris’s link between psychology and the complex amalgamations of their fictional cityscapes, I demonstrate how these cityscapes also allow them to sidestep rather than embrace mental illness as an excuse for their murderous protagonists’ crimes, indicting the institutions at the center of their texts as equally divided and flawed.
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Baker, Timothy C. "Haven in the Bay : problems of community in the novels of George Mackay Brown." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/2229.
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The novels of George Mackay Brown have often been read as upholding a traditional ideal of community as that which is singular and complete, a community which exists outside time and history. As this thesis will show, however, Brown emphasises themes of community, history and myth in his work not in order to validate them without reservation, but to question what use these ideas may have in contemporary life. By reading his novels in conjunction with the work of continental theorists ranging from Martin Heidegger to Jean-Luc Nancy, it becomes apparent that Brown critically explores a post-Kantian modernity in which metaphysical or faith-based foundations are no longer possible. Brown's greatest theme throughout his work is not only how community is built and maintained, but also how it is destroyed, and what life remains after that destruction. Brown continually problematises the idea of community in order to show both its relevance and impossibility in modern society. In separately regarding each of Brown's novels in length, this thesis will highlight the various approaches Brown takes to community: the potentially romantic view of community in Beside the Ocean of time; the centrality of sacrifice for the establishing of community in Magnus; and the interections between community and history in Time in a Red Coat, and Vinland. The thesis then turns directly to the question of the relation between individuals and community in Greenvoe, and ends with a discussion of the way in which Brown portrays his own relation to community in his nonfiction and autobiographical writings. Throughout the thesis, the prevailing notion of Brown as a parochial or naive writer will be continually questioned. In addition, by integrating a wide variety of continental theorists into a discussion of Brown's work, this thesis will explore new opportunities for the general study of contemporary Scottish fiction. By revealing Brown to be a more nuanced thinker of the relation between modernity and community than previous critics have allowed, this thesis will both offer a new perspective on Brown's novels and open new paths for the discussion of the role of community in modern literature.
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Bold, Valentina. "'Nature's making' : James Hogg and the autodidactic tradition in Scottish poetry." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1997. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2759/.
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This thesis explores the autodidactic tradition in Scottish poetry during the nineteenth century. From the late eighteenth century onwards self-taught Scottish poets offered a vigorous alternative to the literary mainstream. Autodidacts explored both oral and literary styles and genres, utilising a wide frame of reference to express their unique experiences and ideas. Diversity of poetic voice characterises autodidactic poets, including Robert Burns, Janet Little, Allan Cunningham, Alexander Anderson and James Young Geddes. However, Scottish autodidacts shared poetic concerns and techniques, and were highly influenced by their compeers. It is suggested that James Hogg, 'the Ettrick Shepherd' is the central and most significant figure in forming a Scottish autodidactic identity. There are three major sections to the thesis. Part One looks at the origins of the 'peasant poet' image in the national context, exploring prototypes such as Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd (1725), Macpherson's Ossian and Burns as 'Heaven-taught ploughman'. The middle section concentrates on Hogg, illustrating the precise ways in which he explored and, at times, resented his peasant poet typecasting. Works considered include Scottish Pastorals (1801), The Mountain Bard (1807 and 1821), The Queen's Wake (1813), The Poetic Mirror (1816), The Royal Jubilee (1822), Queen Hynde (1825), Pilgrims of the Sun (1815 and 1822) and A Queer Book (1832). Part Three discusses Scottish autodidacticism as it developed after Hogg, discerning subgroups within the peasant poet category.
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McNutt, Genevieve Theodora. "Joseph Ritson and the publication of early English literature." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/31497.
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This thesis examines the work of antiquary and scholar Joseph Ritson (1752-1803) in publishing significant and influential collections of early English and Scottish literature, including the first collection of medieval romance, by going beyond the biographical approaches to Ritson's work typical of nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts, incorporating an analysis of Ritson's contributions to specific fields into a study of the context which made his work possible. It makes use of the 'Register of Manuscripts Sent to the Reading Room of the British Museum' to shed new light on Ritson's use of the manuscript collections of the British Museum. The thesis argues that Ritson's early polemic attacks on Thomas Warton, Thomas Percy, and the editors of Shakespeare allowed Ritson to establish his own claims to expertise and authority, built upon the research he had already undertaken in the British Museum and other public and private collections. Through his publications, Ritson experimented with different strategies for organizing, systematizing, interpreting and presenting his research, constructing very different collections for different kinds of texts, and different kinds of readers. A comparison of Ritson's three major collections of songs - A Select Collection of English Songs (1783), Ancient Songs (1790), and Scotish Songs (1794) - demonstrates some of the consequences of his decisions, particularly the distinction made between English and Scottish material. Although Ritson's Robin Hood (1795) is the most frequently reprinted of his collections, and one of the best studied, approaching this work within the immediate context of Ritson's research and other publications, rather than its later reception, offers some explanation for its more idiosyncratic features. Finally, Ritson's Ancient Engleish Metrical Romance's (1802) provides a striking example of Ritson's participation in collaborative networks and the difficulty of finding an audience and a market for editions of early English literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
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Neveling, Nicole. ""All Fur Coat and Nae Knickers" : Darstellungen der Stadt Edinburgh im Roman." Trier WVT Wiss. Verl. Trier, 2006. http://deposit.ddb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?id=2763891&prov=M&dokv̲ar=1&doke̲xt=htm.
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McHugh, Anna. "'I Hecht in Verbo Regio' : Images of the Learned King in Scottish Literature 1375 - 1490." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.504119.
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McKeever, Gerard Lee. "Enlightened fictions and the romantic nation : aesthetics of improvement in long-eighteenth-century Scottish writing." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5768/.
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This thesis participates in the current scholarly reassessment of Scottish Romanticism. Working across conventional Enlightenment and Romantic paradigms, it argues for a ‘long eighteenth century’ view of this writing with salient roots in the Union of 1707. Framed by the rapid economic and social change experienced by Scotland over much of this period, it proposes that Scottish Romanticism is best understood as a modal series of material that engages in various ways with ideas of ‘improvement’, the Enlightenment’s ubiquitous doctrine of progress. This engagement is significantly translated through a negotiation of alternative national identity structures available to Scots at the time: Britishness and forms of Scottishness. As these formations become implicated in a pervasive ‘dialectics of improvement’, Scottish writing develops a series of innovative aesthetic strategies that probe the complex political function of literature. Coordinated around a hegemonic Britishness that is laying claim to the priorities of improvement, forms of Scottishness are repeatedly pushed into alternative roles, including the model of the ‘romantic nation’. Chapters address many of the key Scottish writers of the period as well as some of their less well-known contemporaries, using local case studies as a means to connect and focus the study’s broader concerns. In Chapter One a sequence of fundamentals pertaining to the analysis of Scottish culture is addressed, exploring issues of nation, identity, class and institutional context, alongside the complementary evolution of aesthetic ideologies and cultural nationalisms. Chapter Two turns to Robert Burns as a prime mediator between cultural formations, his sophisticated poetry and self-presentations positioned as crucial to the developing relationship between Scottishness and improvement, while he innovatively heralds future, aesthetic constructions of nationhood. Moving into the early nineteenth century, Chapter Three traces the full emergence of ‘aesthetic nationalism’, primarily in the novels of Walter Scott. Always a contested process, such tension is magnified via the work of James Hogg, before the effects of a pervasive irony in this literary formation are examined. In Chapter Four the improvement problematic in long-eighteenth-century Scotland is further developed, John Galt’s fiction offering extensive reflections, with an ancillary focus on Elizabeth Hamilton shedding light on some key ideological dilemmas and the important role of gender within this trajectory. Finally, a thematic coda uses a reading of Thomas Carlyle to reflect on these aesthetic components of a profound experience of modernisation, their subsequent mediation and continuing relevance.
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Pohjola, Hanna. "Because I Am In My Prime : ”A Psychoanalytical Reading of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”." Thesis, Högskolan i Gävle, Avdelningen för humaniora, 2013. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-14435.
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This essay is a psychoanalytical reading of the Scottish author Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The protagonist is a charismatic teacher, who is popular among her pupils, but who appears to use her power and position merely in order to manipulate her pupils. It appears that Miss Brodie’s main interest is not her pupils’ academic achievements, but she has a different agenda on her mind. This essay examines the unconscious motives behind the protagonist’s peculiar treatment of her pupils by learning more about what takes place in the human mind, when the individual starts to listen to the sound of defensive mechanisms instead of to the sound of logic.
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Gregson, Michael Anthony O'Malley. "Victorian criticism of the Waverley Novels of Sir Walter Scott, 1832 to 1900." Thesis, Open University, 1992. http://oro.open.ac.uk/57391/.
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This thesis examines the phenomenon of Sir Walter Scott's extraordinary Victorian popularity. Focussing on criticism of his Waverley Novels between 1832 - the year of his death - and the end of the century, the thesis plots the development and terms of Scott's eminence. An introductory chapter sets out principal areas of study, being followed by a section leading up to 1832. Then follow analyses of critical work on Scott by, respectively, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, Walter Bagehot, John Ruskin, Leslie Stephen, Richard Hutton and Julia Wedgwood. The thesis concludes with an epilogic section covering critics of the late nineteenth century, including Frederic Harrison and Andrew Lang. In each instance the context of each critic's wider work figures prominently. The thesis contends that large elements of Scott's achievement received relatively little attention in Victorian criticism. These are Scotti,s Enlightenment interests in speculative history and detailed, almost sociological, methods of composition, as well as the 'experimental' character of his work. By contrast, much was made in criticism of what may be summarised as his 'health' and 'beneficial effects'. It is claimed that the construction of such consensual critical notions about the merits of Scott's very popular work had a great deal to do with the buttressing and underpinning of some Victorian attitudes. While these varied with critics' own preoccupations - and Scott's 'malleability' is remarkable - Scott's role was so significant in Victorian culture that his employment, within what was still a relatively eclectic and formally undisciplined critical practice, constituted significant ideological manoeuvring. Specifically, Scott's remit in Victorian criticism was most usually to represent and validate some kind of opposition to the present. This both excluded much of his achievement, and also narrowed the terms of his appraisal so as to permit a revealing coalescence of literary with social, political and even racial arguments. This thesis traces the increasing definition of such a pattern within Victorian criticism of the Waverley Novels.