| ||||||
Similar Journals
|
Studies in Scottish Literature
Number of Followers: 5  Open Access journalISSN (Print) 0039-3770 Published by U of South Carolina  [4 journals]
|
- Notes on Contributors
Abstract: Brief biographical notes on contributors to Hugh MacDiarmid at 100 (SSL 49.1)
PubDate: Tue, 13 Feb 2024 07:58:13 PST
- Denis Saurat’s ‘The Scottish Renaissance Group’ / ‘Le Groupe De
“La Renaissance Écossaise”’: An English Translation
Authors: Paul Malgrati
Abstract: Presents an annotated translation of Denis Saurat's 'Le Groupe de la Renaissance Écossaise' (1924), a seminal piece in the history of Scottish modernism, hitherto inaccessible in English, that introduced the works of both Christopher Murray Grieve and Hugh MacDiarmid (considered as two different entities) to the international literary scene.
PubDate: Tue, 13 Feb 2024 07:58:08 PST
- Introduction: Denis Saurat on ‘“The Scottish
Renaissance” Group’
Authors: Scott Lyall
Abstract: 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.
PubDate: Tue, 13 Feb 2024 07:58:03 PST
- The Real Christopher: Sleights of Text and Mind Behind the Persona of Hugh
MacDiarmid
Authors: Alexander Linklater
Abstract: 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 antagonist. In this essay, the author of a new life of MacDiarmid explores how the dominant figure of 20th century Scottish literature composed himself out of found texts, psychological misdirection and confected autobiography.
PubDate: Tue, 13 Feb 2024 07:57:58 PST
- Provincialising MacDiarmid: Decolonisation and Scottish Literary History
Authors: Alex Thomson
Abstract: 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 Scotttish exceptionalism and challenges the political romanticism associated with the aesthetic construction of the national, endorsed by MacDiarmid and continued by recent cultural and literary histories [Ed.] .
PubDate: Tue, 13 Feb 2024 07:57:53 PST
- ‘No further from the “centre of things”’: Peripheral Citation in
Hugh MacDiarmid’s In Memoriam James Joyce
Authors: James Benstead
Abstract: 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 “provincial modernism” identified by Robert Crawford.
PubDate: Tue, 13 Feb 2024 07:57:48 PST
- Linguistic Islands: Archipelagic Perspectives in Hugh MacDiarmid’s
‘Vision of World Language’
Authors: Fiona Paterson
Abstract: 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 plurality, and driven by an attempt to capture both simultaneity and progressivism.
PubDate: Tue, 13 Feb 2024 07:57:43 PST
- MacDiarmid the Spaceman: Extraterrestrial Space in Hugh MacDiarmid’s
Poetry from Sangschaw to A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
Authors: Michael H. Whitworth
Abstract: 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 in popular astronomy works by Felix Eberty and Camille Flammarion. It also compares his conception of the earth as a moving object in space with that found in poems by Thomas Hardy.
PubDate: Tue, 13 Feb 2024 07:57:37 PST
- Chitterin’ Lichts: Text and Intertext in Sangschaw and Penny Wheep
Authors: Patrick Crotty
Abstract: 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 the English sonnets and prose sketches of the young Christopher Grieve and the encyclopaedic long poems to which MacDiarmid turned after abandoning Scots in the 1930s. The article attends in particular to the wide-angle allusiveness of Sangschaw and Penny Wheep, arguing that the poems in those volumes are most successful when they bring material drawn from the Scots lexicon into vital relationship with non-dictionary-drawn cultural artefacts of one sort or another. These include proverbs, myths, plays, novels, poems, nursery rhymes, ballads and hymns. The radically innovative reading of ‘The Watergaw’ at the climax of the essay interprets MacDiarmid’s inaugural Scots lyric as a verbally electric response to a famous Presbyterian hymn rather than a poem of autobiographical reflection.
PubDate: Tue, 13 Feb 2024 07:57:32 PST
- ‘To “meddle wi’ the Thistle”’: C. M. Grieve’s Scottish
Chapbook, the Little Magazine, and the Dilemmas of Scottish Modernism
Authors: Scott Lyall
Abstract: 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 periods. While the Chapbook’s brief lifespan (1922–23) was typical for modernist little magazines, the dilemmas encountered by Grieve’s periodical – restricted finances, lack of avant-garde contributors – are explained here as a side-effect of ‘localist modernism’, a concept defined by Eric B. White.
PubDate: Tue, 13 Feb 2024 07:57:27 PST
- The Ghost of John Nisbet: Hugh MacDiarmid’s First Published Work
Authors: Alan Riach
Abstract: 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,' arguing that 'Performing "Nisbet" as a play intimates the drama of fractured modernist selfhood implicit in the written text,' and concluding that it should be seen 'in the whole national context of Scotland finding a way towards a reconstruction of itself, a place in which a new ‘home’ might be made, by such characters as are imagined here, and those who come later: a purpose which remained MacDiarmid’s indomitable dedication.' [Ed.]
PubDate: Tue, 13 Feb 2024 07:57:22 PST
- Introduction: Hugh MacDiarmid at 100
Authors: Scott Lyall
Abstract: 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 become central to the Scottish literary canon but somewhat marginal to canonical modernism,
PubDate: Tue, 13 Feb 2024 07:57:17 PST
- Series Editors' Preface to SSL 49.1
Authors: Patrick Scott et al.
Abstract: 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.,
PubDate: Tue, 13 Feb 2024 07:57:14 PST
- Contributors to SSL 48:2
Abstract: Brief biographical notes on contributors to the current journal issue.
PubDate: Mon, 12 Jun 2023 05:56:10 PDT
- Books Received and Noted
Authors: Patrick Scott
Abstract: Brief reviews or notices of some recent books about Scottish literature, Scottish writers, and related topics.
PubDate: Mon, 12 Jun 2023 05:56:07 PDT
- ‘Scoto-Shamanistic’: The Collected Works of Kenneth White
Authors: Richie McCaffery
Abstract: 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, to Geddes and MacDiarmid.
PubDate: Mon, 12 Jun 2023 05:56:02 PDT
- A New Study of Cunninghame Graham
Authors: Carla Sassi
Abstract: 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 investigation," and suggesting that Cunninghame Graham's "construction and performance of his identities as a writer, adventurer, politician and activist should indeed be seen as an artistic expression in its own right."
PubDate: Mon, 12 Jun 2023 05:55:57 PDT
- Scott’s Reparative Land Ethic
Authors: Nigel Leask
Abstract: 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," so that Scott's poetry and novels "assume a new relevance for 21st century readers".
PubDate: Mon, 12 Jun 2023 05:55:53 PDT
- Burns and Jean Armour, Ellisland, 1788: A Letter Fragment in the Roy
Collection
Authors: Patrick Scott
Abstract: 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 (now the Blavatnik-Honresfield Collection), but this section, now in the G. Ross Roy Collection at the University of South Carolina, was snipped off by the then-owner Mary MacLaughlan Nicolson for a collector before Waddell saw it and has not previously been known to Burns's editors.
PubDate: Mon, 12 Jun 2023 05:55:49 PDT
- Burns and the Altar of Independence: A Question of Authentication
Authors: Patrick Scott et al.
Abstract: 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 forgery), to its current location in the J.M.Shaw Collection, Florida State University Libraries, where more recent internal records catalogue it as authentic; points out evidence confirming its authenticity; and provides the first collation of the manuscript against the text published by James Currie in 1800.
PubDate: Mon, 12 Jun 2023 05:55:46 PDT
