Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Preface To Ssl 45.2, Patrick Scott, Tony Jarrells

Studies in Scottish Literature

A brief introduction to the issue contents, future issues, a 35% increase in 2018-2019 in use of the digital version, and a significant further gift to the journal's endowment.

Introduction: The Ghost At The Feast: Religion In Scottish Literary Criticism, Patrick Scott

Studies in Scottish Literature

Surveys changes in Scottish institutional religion, summarizes Crawford Gribben's critique in 2006 of Scottish literary criticism's long-time anti-Calvinist bias, and introduces essays reappraising the treatment of belief by Scottish poets and novelists from varied religious backgrounds and the critical response to this aspect of their work.

Presbyterianism, 'Scottish Literature,' And John Galt's Annals Of The Parish, Robert P. Irvine

Studies in Scottish Literature

In discussing religion in John Galt's novel about religious and social change in a small West of Scotland town between 1760 and 1820, suggests “Scottish literature” was forged, not in opposition to Calvinist theological ideas, but to the Kirk as a rival national institution, and that Scottish literature became "national," less through self-from the literature of another nation (England), than from another institution with a rival claim to represent the same nation, namely the established Scottish church.

Recovered Images: Medieval Echoes In C. S. Lewis’S Space Trilogy, Nathan Earl Houston Fayard

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

C. S. Lewis has begun to garner more scholarly attention in the last few decades, but his first novels, his science fiction or Space trilogy, continue to be largely ignored by academia. Yet, these three novels are deserving of more serious study, as they are pioneering works of literary science fiction, and even more surprisingly, of literary medievalism. Though long derided as mere reactionary attacks on Modernism and science, when properly understood, these strange and wonderful tales actually reveal the complexity and nuance of Lewis’s response to his times. In them, the Inkling author creates a unique combination of the …

Philosophical Vagabonds: Pedestrianism, Politics, And Improvement On The Scottish Tour, Nigel Leask

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses John Bristed's "facetious, digressive" memoir, Anthroplanomenos (1803), about a walking tour through the Highlands of lScotland in 1801 by two young students "disguised as American sailors, with little money and no identity papers,” describing their adventures and misadventures as they encountered suspicion, hostility and sometimes surprising kindness; brings out the two travellers’ often-self-contradictory responses to what they saw and experienced; and shows how the tour contributed to their changing political perspective, mirroring the turn away from 1790s radicalism in better-known writers in the same years. An edited version of the 2017 Marilyn Butler Lecture, for the British Association for …

Border Police: Scott’S Minstrelsy Of The Scottish Border, The Law, And The 1790s, Penny Fielding

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802 etc) in the context of Border history, Scottish legal philosophy, the jurisdictional and cultural concept of the "Debateable Lands," and the Scottish political situation during the political trials and the Militia Act riots in the 1790s. .

W.S. Graham: ‘Born In A Diamond Screeched From A Mountain Pap’, Gerard Carruthers

Studies in Scottish Literature

Provides a centenary reassessment of the Scottish poet W. S. Graham (1918-1986), increasingly recognized as a writer of enduring significance, both for Scottish poetry and for 20th century Modernist poetry more broadly, through close readings of poems from different phases of Graham’s writing career. An edited version of the Hugh MacDiarmid Lecture in March 2018 at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh.

Scenic And Textual Venice In Muriel Spark’S Territorial Rights, Tomás Monterrey

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses Muriel Spark's “international comedy of manners” Territorial Rights (1979), both as a heavily-plotted and "starkly-realistic" thriller about a wouldbe criminal in Venice who challenges an American millionaire, till both are defeated by the machinations of the secretive agency GESS, and in terms of Park's satirical view on western moral decadence and metafictional concerns, arguing that the narrator’s apparently limited omniscience brings together a compelling polyphony of characters, rendering events through their individual, unreliable, and often contradictory points of view.

George Thomson To Robert Burns: A Newly-Identified Manuscript Letter-Fragment, Gerard Lee Mckeever

Studies in Scottish Literature

Describes and illustrates a newly-identified fragment (final page) of a letter to Robert Burns in April 1793 from George Thomson, editor of the Select Collection of Original Scotish Songs, in the Newberry Library, Chicago, discusses the date of the letter and of the Burns song "The Soger's Return" on the letter verso, and reviews the implication of the manuscript for the sequence of letters in the Thomson-Burns correspondence.

‘The Hope That Someone Might Present Them With A Kilmarnock Burns’: The National Library Of Scotland’S First Kilmarnock, Robert Betteridge

Studies in Scottish Literature

Recounts, from correspondence and minutes in the National Library of Scotland, and from contemporary newspapers, the library's unsuccessful efforts to attract a donated copy of Robert Burns's first book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock: John Wilson, 1786), and its successful purchase at auction in 1950 of the "Hoe copy," with original wrappers bound in.

A New Janet Hamilton Manuscript, Robert Maclean, Gerard Carruthers

Studies in Scottish Literature

Describes and illustrates a newly-identified short poem in the distinctive hand of the Scottish working-class poet Janet Hamilton (1795-1873), discovered tipped into a volume of The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852 [1853]), in University of Glasgow Library, with information on the provenance of the volume.

A ‘Scoto-British-European’ Rediscovered: The Life And Writings Of George Lauder, Kelsey Jackson Williams

Studies in Scottish Literature

Review of: Alasdair A. MacDonald, George Lauder (1603-1670): Life and Writings. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2018.The review suggests that, until Alasdair MacDonald’s book, the "originality, ingenuity, and significance" of the expatriate Scots soldier and poet George Lauder (1603-1670) "have been radically underestimated," and in exploring MacDonald's book, which is both biography and edition, provides a introductory critical assessment of Lauder's varied poetry and translations, endorsing as more widely applicable MacDonald's argument that "Scots writing in English deserve equal attention as their Scotophone counterparts" and that "'authors who are innovative in drawing inspiration from new foreign models deserve better than to …

Scotland And The Geometric Imagination, Mike Hill

Studies in Scottish Literature

Review of: Matthew Wickman. Literature After Euclid: The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.The review praises Wickman's "extraordinary book," designed to “throw a wrench into grand narratives about modernity,” summarizing its wide-ranging argument about the centrality of spatial, visual and geometric thought in what Wickman calls "the long looping eighteenth century," in Scottish philosophy, education and literature, and commenting briefly on the implications of Wickman's argument for "how literary canons are made" and "the dynamics of disciplines."

A Correction To Ssl 42.2 (2016), Patrick Scott

Studies in Scottish Literature

Corrects a sentence about Sorley MacLean's An Cuilithionn in SSL’s brief notice (SSL 42.2 [2016], 386) of the centenary volume Ainmeil Thar Cheudan (Sleat: Clò Ostaig, 2016), at the request of the volume editors, and records the price of the volume.

Contributors To Ssl 45.1

Studies in Scottish Literature

No abstract provided.

Douglas’S Palyce Of Honour Re-Edited, P. J. Klemp

Studies in Scottish Literature

Review of: David J. Parkinson, ed. Gavin Douglas: “The Palyce of Honour.” 2nd edition. Kalamazoo, MI: Published for TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies) in Association with the University of Rochester by Medieval Institute Publications, 2018. Judging the volume an "impressive accomplishment," the review draws attention to Parkinson's much expanded introduction, which provides both "first-rate literary criticism" and "a comprehensive study of Douglas’s biography and the Palyce’s textual issues, language, and participation in the genre of the dream vision."

Is It ‘A Marriage Of True Minds’? Balanced Reading In Northanger Abbey And Persuasion, Lynda A. Hall

English Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Jane Austen often uses reading as a way to develop her characters. For instance, in Persuasion, Captain Benwick‘s melancholic disposition is revealed through his partiality for Romantic poetry, but Anne Elliot’s value for balance is expressed when she recommends moral essays. Other times, and not unfrequently, characters’ reading choice falls on the works of William Shakespeare—such as Hamlet, which Willoughby reads to Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, and the excerpts from Elegant Extracts we learn that Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland has memorized.

Some of Austen’s characters read Shakespeare with seductive intent, but others show their …

“Twins In Blood Only: Zadie Smith's White Teeth And The Failure Of Foils”, Leah Kind

Faculty Publications & Research

My presentation is titled, “Twins in Blood Only: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and the Failure of Foils”. I initially conceived of this to be a conference paper, but as I jumped into the novel with a class of high school juniors and seniors last spring, I realized that it was the germ of a conference paper, but also a truly dynamic teaching text. What follows is my experiences teaching the novel, as well as how my students and myself worked through some of the more complex and troubling aspects of the plot. I’m retaining my focus on the role of …

“Thus Seyden Sadde Folk” : Chaucer’S Oxford Clerk On Theological Controversy In The 14th Century, Molly K. Kluever

Forum Lectures

Of all of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Clerk’s Tale is perhaps the most disturbing. The alarmingly submissive Griselda and her husband-cum-tormenter Walter have horrified and frustrated scholars with their irrational behavior for centuries. Although considered a teller of one of Chaucer’s “religious tales,” the Clerk’s seeming ambivalence about his tale’s moral has rendered most, if not all, theological readings unsatisfying and inconclusive. For this reason, the Clerk’s Tale has primarily been studied for the glimpse it provides into medieval gender politics. My research, however, attempts to situate the tale within its theological context by paying more attention to its …

Ofermod And Aristocratic Chivalry In J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings, Amber Dunai

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper explores connections between J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1953 Essays and Studies publication The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son and representations of ofermod and aristocratic “chivalry” in The Lord of the Rings. Focusing on the motivations and leadership-related decisions of Denethor and Faramir in The Lord of the Rings, this paper argues that Faramir's behavior and motivations, despite Denethor’s implications to the contrary, cannot be described in terms of ofermod regardless of the risk that his choice to reject the Ring appears to pose to Gondor. By contrast, Denethor and his son Boromir represent the pride-motivated decision-making and rash …