Studies in Scottish Literature

http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl

List of Papers (Total 1,147)

Denis Saurat’s ‘The Scottish Renaissance Group’ / ‘Le Groupe De “La Renaissance Écossaise”’: An English Translation

Presents an annotated translation of Denis Saurat's 'Le Groupe de la Renaissance Écossaise

Introduction: Denis Saurat on ‘“The Scottish Renaissance” Group’

Provides the biographical context and publication history for Denis Saurat’s essay ‘Le groupe de “la Renaissance Écossaise”’, which included Saurat’s French translation of some MacDiarmid poems, describes the essay’s importance in the history of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, explains some shortcomings in Saurat’s perspectives on the ‘renaissance’ and MacDiarmid’s work.

The Real Christopher: Sleights of Text and Mind Behind the Persona of Hugh MacDiarmid

Argues that it was the persona of Hugh MacDiarmid, as much as his poetry, which brought about the Scottish Literary Renaissance of the 1920s, but that behind the extravagant personality lay an obscure biographical puzzle. Christopher Murray Grieve possessed little personal resemblance to his pseudonymous self and even less interest in what motivated him to create such an...

Provincialising MacDiarmid: Decolonisation and Scottish Literary History

Examines the development of MacDiarmid's aesthetic and political views, in light of decolonial theory and criticism, as showing the 'inexorable and exigent doubling of Scotland with Empire', arguing that though MacDiarmid has been central to the construction of a postcolonial Scottish literary history, free from historical anxiety, a decolonial approach unsettles the narrative of...

‘No further from the “centre of things”’: Peripheral Citation in Hugh MacDiarmid’s In Memoriam James Joyce

Examines Hugh MacDiarmid’s “citational poetics” – that is, his practice of selecting material from a wide range of pre-existing texts, before transforming that material and then combining it in his own work, often without attribution – and shows how reading MacDiarmid’s long 1955 poem In Memoriam James Joyce with reference to this practice places that text within the lineage of...

Linguistic Islands: Archipelagic Perspectives in Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘Vision of World Language’

Examines the impact of an archipelagic perspective upon Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘vision of world language’ as set forth in the 1955 poem In Memoriam James Joyce. Informed by his travels to Scottish islands, documented in The Islands of Scotland (1939), and his engagements with Norn in Shetland, MacDiarmid’s vision is both expansive and particular, characterised by its decentralised...

MacDiarmid the Spaceman: Extraterrestrial Space in Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry from Sangschaw to A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle

Looking at Hugh MacDiarmid’s Sangschaw (1925), Penny Wheep (1926), and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), this article considers MacDiarmid’s use of science, particularly astronomy, in the 1920s. It traces known and possible sources for his scientific knowledge in books and periodicals, especially The New Age. It examines the image of light travelling through space, found...

Chitterin’ Lichts: Text and Intertext in Sangschaw and Penny Wheep

The essay takes a new look at an old subject, the role of dictionaries in Hugh MacDiarmid’s so-called ‘early lyrics’. While demonstrating that the poet’s exploration of the lexicographical remains of Scots was more thorough-going and systematic than previous accounts have suggested, it positions his recourse to dictionaries in the intertextual habit that links the lyrics both to...

‘To “meddle wi’ the Thistle”’: C. M. Grieve’s Scottish Chapbook, the Little Magazine, and the Dilemmas of Scottish Modernism

Examines C. M. Grieve’s (Hugh MacDiarmid’s) most important journal enterprise, The Scottish Chapbook, which critics have assumed marks the beginning of a modernist Scottish renaissance. Against this view, this article argues that the range of contributions to the Chapbook were generally not modernist in their formal characteristics, many recalling the Victorian or fin-de-siècle...

The Ghost of John Nisbet: Hugh MacDiarmid’s First Published Work

Discusses the first published item, a short play, signed with the name 'Hugh M'acDiamid', and sets in its biographical and historical context just after the First World War and in the literary context of 1922 and international modernism, in 1922, viewing it as 'an encapsulation of its moment, and most importantly as an elegiac tribute to a friend,

Introduction: Hugh MacDiarmid at 100

Explains the background for this special issue, Hugh MacDiarmid at 100, in the Scottish Revival Network’s conference in August 2022, which marked the centenary of Hugh MacDiarmid’s first appearance in print under that name in The Scottish Chapbook in August 1922, and then, before summarizing the themes of each essay, discusses ways in which MacDiarmid’s legacy and reputation have...

Series Editors

Notes the significance of the issue topic for SSL's founder G. Ross Roy, notes that C. M. Grieve was on the original editorial board in 1963, and discusses briefly ho MacDiamid has been treated in the journal over the past 60 years. Thanks the guest editors for assembling contributions that reflect current perspectives. ,

Liz Lochhead and the Fairies: Context and Influence in Grimm Sisters and Dreaming Frankenstein

Examines the Scottish poet Liz Lochhead's period of North American travel and her response to American second-wave feminist poetics, particularly to the anthology No More Masks! (1973) and the poetry of Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton, the treatment of myth by J.G. Frazer and Robert Graves, and the perspective on Scottish fairy tales offered by folklorists, to explore Lochhead's...

A History of the Scottish P.E.N. Organization, Part 1: 1927-1949

The first article in a two-part series charting the history of Scottish PEN, from its founding in 1927, through political struggles in the 1930s, and at the international congress in Edinburgh in 1934, over issues of intellectual freedom and the rise of Hitler, till the need to reestablish the organization after World War II, exploring Scottish PEN's relationship to the 20th...

‘Scoto-Shamanistic’: The Collected Works of Kenneth White

A review-essay discussing the work and influence of the expatriate Scottish poet and cultural theorist Kenneth White, based on vols 1-2 of the new Edinburgh University Press edition of White's Collected Works, edited by Cairns Craig (2021, paperback 2023), placing White in a line of Scottish polymath internationalist writers, from Buchanan and Urquhart, through Miller and Carlyle...

A New Study of Cunningham Graham

Surveys the steady growth of interest in the Scottish fin-de-siècle writer, adventurer, socialist M.P., and nationalist leader R. B. Cunninghame Graham (1852-1936), and reviews Lachlan Munro's "timely and important study" R. B. Cunninghame Graham and Scotland: Party, Prose, and Political Aesthetic (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), judging it an "inspiring and innovative...

Scott’s Reparative Land Ethic

A review essay discussing Susan Oliver's "important and convincing" book Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland: Emergent Ecologies of a Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2021), noting Scott's land ethic and active role in managing his estate at Abbotsford and in afforestation, and suggesting that Oliver's book presents "a cumulative literary history of Scotland’s ecologies...

Burns and Jean Armour, Ellisland, 1788: A Letter Fragment in the Roy Collection

Describes and illustrates a two-sided fragment of Robert Burns's letter from Ellisland to his wife Jean Armour, in Muchline, from September 12, 1788, concerning her move to join him, and news for his brother Gilbert. Only four letters from Burns to Jean are now known; the main body of this letter was printed by Waddell in 1869, and was later recorded in the Honresfield Collection...

Burns and the Altar of Independence: A Question of Authentication

Describes and illustrates the only known manuscript of Robert Burns's short 'Poetical Inscription for an Altar to Independence'; notes ongoing disputes over the authenticity of several other of Burns's political poems from the 1790s; traces the manuscript's provenance from the Kern sale in 1929 (when it was cataloged as genuine) to Sotheby's in 1982 (when it was cataloged as a...

Robert Burns to Maria Riddell, a Lost Burns Manuscript and a Victorian Facsimile

Reviews the textual history of Robert Burns's brief letter to Maria Riddell, in spring 1795, in Dumfries, mentioning the miniature portrait by Alexander Reid; notes that the manuscript, owned in the late 19th century by Dr Thomas C.S. Corry of Belfast, and later by John Gribbel of Philadelphia, cannot now be located; and describes and illustrates the facsimile made of it in 1864...

Walter Scott, the Two Sicilies, and Events ‘of Recent Date’

Traces Walter Scott's interest in Sicily and Naples through his earlier writing up to his travels to both in 1831-1832, discusses his treatment of Neapolitan history and politics in essays in 1816 and 1829, especially his accounts of Joachim Murat (1767-1815), king of Naples from 1808-1815, and in Masaniello, leader of the popular rising in 1647-48, and suggests how these...

Robert Watson’s Lectures at St. Andrews: Logic, Rhetoric and Metaphysics

Examines the contributions to rhetoric of Robert Watson (1730?-1781), Professor of Logic, Rhetoric, and Metaphysics at the University of St. Andrews from1756-1778, and Principal from 1778-1781, based on surviving manuscript sources at St Andrews, and demonstrates the philosophic diversity in rhetorical theory at this time, showing differences among the Scottish literati on the...